PROCESSED
US3SF*5
BIG PROCESSED FOOD ISSUE
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2010
http://www.archive.org/details/processedworld15proc
PROCESSED
WDP.LO
Talking Heads 2
introduction
Letters 3
tiom our readers
Skeleton 9
poem by Harvey Stein
Quarantine Corner 10
collective editorial
Dear Del Monte 13
article by Paxa Lourde
Chainsaws & CRTs Do Not A Forest Make 20
review by Primitivo Morales
Fire Against Ice: Cannery Strike 23
article by Caitlin Manning & Louis Michaelson
Montgomery Street Morning 29
fiction by Steve Koppman
Road Warriors & Road Worriers 31
tale of toil by Bob McGlynn
Poetry 38
Simon, Paris, Watson, Hamilton, Zable, Warden
925 Crawl 40
fiction by Kathleen Hulser
Remembrance Of A Temp Past 42
review by D.S. Black
Cover Graphic By: Norman Dog
"The Magazine
With A Bad Attitude
CREDITS: Primitivo Mor-
ales, Pauline Slug, Linda
Thomas, Ana Logue, Den-
nis Hayes, Emily, Lucius
Cabins, Paxa Lourde, Max-
ine Holz, Zoe Noe, Med-O,
Louis Michaelson, D.S.
Black, Friends of the Toad,
Myra Way, Steve C, The
Big Mud Duck, Clayton
Sheridan, Bevel, Michelle
L.P., and many others...
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Talking Heads 1
Processed World has changed enormously over the four
and a half years since it began. Many of the changes seem
entirely positive. We've gained a lot of skill in editing and
production. We tackle a wider range of subjects. Our
circulation has risen — and broadened; we now reach most
European countries (including Poland and the USSR) as well
as Australia, Malaysia and the Antilles. PW articles have
been reprinted in eight or more foreign languages. We've
been written up in all kinds of publications both local and
national. In short, we present at least the appearance of a
"professional" alternative magazine with a growing
international reputation.
In an important sense, though, the magazine has gone in a
different direction than the one its founders intended. PW
was to be a meeting point for dissatisfied and rebellious
workers in the "new" technical and service sectors, a place
where they could vent their frustrations and share their
dreams. So far, so good. But we wanted to go beyond
frustration-venting and dream-sharing to help develop
strategies for organized resistance at work. We wanted the
rebellion to become practical.
In 1980-1981, this didn't look so farfetched. Revolt was in
the air — over the draft, nuclear power, pollution. Punk had
galvanized many young people (including us) with its stylish
anti-style and fuck-you attitude. Major efforts were
underway by various unions (SEIU, Local 925, etc.) to
organize private-sector office workers. More important,
there were underground "independent unions" and
employee networks in several large corporations. But as the
Right got a firmer grip on the mass media and as the
recession hit, terrorizing millions of workers into submission,
the revolt largely faded away. Today, an atmosphere of
anxious subservience, thinly veiled in born-again patriotism
and consumption-mania, pervades daily life.
With office work in particular, the problem goes even
deeper. PW has always distinguished its "take" on work-
place organizing from more traditional approaches by point-
ing out that most work in the modern office is at best useless
in terms of real human needs, and at worst (as with real-
estate, banking, and nuclear and military contracting)
actively destructive. Rebel office workers, sensing this, don't
identify with their work. They generally change jobs often
and work as little as possible. Their revolt takes the form of
on-the-job ^organizing — absenteeism, disinformation,
sabotage. They seldom view as worthwhile either the risk or
the effort involved in creating a workers' self-defense
organization. Moreover, rightly or wrongly, they believe that
most workers, who identify more with their jobs, also identify
with management. As a result, the rebels tend to be as alien-
ated from their co-workers as they are from the boss.
Perhaps this is why PW s extensive discussions of autono-
mous office-worker organizing seem to fall largely on deaf
ears — while its frequent references to sabotage have made it
notorious. Nevertheless, we are pursuing our interest in col-
lective worker resistance with two articles in this issue — Fire
Against Ice, which describes how a previously passive work-
force of immigrant women at two frozen food plants have
fought back with their own organization against manage-
ment, the law, and the dead weight of "their" union, and
Road Warriors/Road Worriers, which analyzes the condi-
tions faced by New York bike messengers and discusses their
attempts at change.
Still, any real mass upsurge seems far away. In that case,
isn't PW in danger of marketing the image of a non-existent
revolt to be passively consumed by its reader-contributors?
Perhaps. But we think that even in the absence of real revolt,
PW is helping to create the cultural preconditions for it. Again
and again, readers tell us: "I thought I was the only person
who felt this way. Now I know I'm not alone." One of PWs
principal aims is to make people feel good about hating their
jobs, not to mention despising the dullness and ugliness of so
much of life in general. Hence our continuing focus on night-
mare visions of that life, expressed in this issue in 925 Crawl,
a journey through the office world's Heart of Darkness, and
Montgomery Street Morning, in which a young worker looks
twice at the ragged casualties hitting him up for spare
change, with eerie results. The isolation and alienation of the
lone office rebel are also powerfully described in The Temp,
reviewed here in Remembrance of a Temp Past.
PW has always maintained that, beyond a culture of
resistance and some organized self-defense against
corporate and governmental power, we need a complete re-
invention of the social world. This reinvention can begin, in
imagination at least, from almost any aspect of contemporary
reality. Thus Dear Del Monte, which starts out as a hilarious
account of work in the complaints department of a food
processing company, concludes with a vision of how our
relationship to producing food — and thus to the land
itself — might be transformed. Our other book review in this
issue, Chainsaws and CRT's, picks up on the same theme in
its discussion of Ecodefense, a handbook of "monkey-
wrenching," direct-action techniques for defending our
remaining wilderness against the likes of Crown Zellerbach.
Finally, it comes down to this. Through PW, we try to
assert lucid imagination against Rambo-style reactionary
fantasy, true diversity against careerist "individualism,"
free solidarity against authoritarian fake community, name-
less wildness against well-organized death. This helps us to
survive a bleak time. We hope it does the same for you.
Together, perhaps, we can achieve a lot more. Write us.
Processed World, 55 Sutter St. #829, San Francisco, CA 94104
LGTTGRS
Notes From The High Heeled Feminist
Let's get a few things straight. For one
thing, there is nothing wrong with being
sexy (albeit, if the High Heeled Feminist
has to look at one more picture of Ms.
Madonna she is going to vomit). Repressed
sexuality is, in my humble opinion, one of
the prime causes of sexism.
The H.H.F. is, I admit, somewhat
fortunate in the fact that the office in which
she works enforces no dress code. The
H.H.F. has been known on occasion to
show up to work in slit skirts and skin tight
stirrup pants. Whereas this mode of attire
may be perfectly acceptable on the dance
floor, it can produce very subliminal traces
of nervousness among the H.H.F. s male
co-workers. But, thank God, it doesn't
elicit the thinly guised flirtations one
witnesses in the elevator among the well
dressed set.
Three piece suits seem to effect the
corporate hormones in a very peculiar way.
Business persons who work from nine to
five exist in a very definite time structure
and tend to organize their social life
accordingly. They make initial contact
during business hours, negotiate over
lunch and close the contract after five.
Business becomes pleasure and vice versa.
The H.H.F. thinks this is all a piece of 20%
polyester wool blend pocket lint.
I mean, how can anyone start a meaning-
ful relationship over the clickety clack of
the archaic typewriter and the gratifying,
yet sterile, exchange between the worker
and the word processor. Hey, the H.H.F. is
a modern girl and know how alluring those
peripheral devices can be (look forward to
my next essay on the computer widow).
But getting back on the subject, it seems
that overt sexualitv threatens the white
male superiority complex more than
corporate feminism. Is it because women
who celebrate their sexual differences are
considered to be stupid and therefore
unacceptable as coworkers, or is it simply
that those wool tweeds and starched collars
leave so much more to the imagination (the
H.H.F. is, incidentally, in total agreement
with Michelle La Place's article "The
Dead-End Game of Corporate Feminism"
that graced the pages of Processed World
#7).
. Then again, the woman who plays the
man's game of 'dress for success' may just
be a higher trophy of conquest. What the
white male superiority complex really
yearns for is complete female subordina-
tion on all levels of the corporate ladder
(the H.H.F. admits to generalizing shame-
lessly; Yes, Virginia they're all a bunch of
poodle butts).
Now don't get me wrong, the H.H.F.
does not go out of her way to dress
provocatively to exploit her figure. Au
contraire, the H.H.F. is painfully (it only
PROCESSED WORLD #15
hurts when I laugh) aware of the fact that
she has no figure to exploit in the first
place (I'm in favor of androgyny, actually, I
even asked for a gender blender for
Christmas, but I got a Cuisinart instead).
No, the H.H.F. dresses as if she were on
the dance floor because that is bloody well
where she would rather be.
What it all boils down to is a question of
self expression and being able to be
yourself in all walks of life no matter who or
what you are (albeit if the H.H.F. has to
look at one more picture of Ms. Cyndi
Lauper she is going to vomit; look forward
to my upcoming essay on women in
corporate rock) without having to be
exposed to those "acceptable levels" of
sexism that can be oh so tiresome. I mean,
haven't we all got more important things to
occupy our mental energy on? Until next
time...
Love and anarchy,
The High Heeled Feminist
Dear PW,
As a single feminist, I must admit when I
read both articles on motherhood in #14 I
was prepared to be annoyed. However,
they turned out to be quite reasonable and
very well written. There was none of that
we-biological-mothers-are-superior air that
I have sometimes personally encountered.
Though childless myself, I feel that
parenthood and co-equal parenting are
central issues that in one way or another
affect every woman and man. I myself
quite proudly belong to two family-cen-
tered, anti-interventionist alternative birth-
ing and childcare groups.
I remember several years ago at work
one real princess type shrieked at me "You
can talk if you ever have any children"
when I dared to put my two cents in about
overly clinical, high tech maternity care.
As it was she was very machine and male-
doctor-god oriented, but my views were the
ones vindicated some years later. I wonder
what she thinks of co-equal parenting.
Anyway, I hope someday you have
articles by single women without children
mi se&fi©
Q
frr
UTS fw>«#^»£v;„
^
who are also doing their thing to fight this
over-technologized, over- homogenized
world we live in.
As extended family, we contribute too.
Auntie Mimi — Merion Stn., PA
Dear PW,
Something just crystallized in my mind
today:
I have long been stuck for an answer
when people ask me the embarassing
question, "Are you working?" Now it has
finally occurred to me that their reason for
asking can be broken down into four
different components:
1) They want to know if I'm filling my
time with some satisfying, "productive"
activity like an adult is supposed to do;
2) They want to know if I have enough
money to make ends meet;
3) They want to know if I'm being a
"liberated woman" and earning my own
paycheck;
4) They want to know if I'm conforming
to the puritan work ethic for its own sake
(i.e. "Doing work you hate is good for
you") which they've been conditioned to
accept as gospel. This attitude is especially
prevalent in Boston.
I think people's reason for asking that
question is usually a combination of all four
ryrr>Tr<r<r<rd"<rr<nnr<ryyri
The Metaphor Family
a j
Something is wrong at Ralph & Norma Metaphor's home. Ralph hasn't even touched his picture of martinis!
of these, but I'd have a different answer for
each one:
1) I might be able to if people like you
would get off my back!
2) Yes, I live with a postal employee who
makes $20,000 a year.
3) No. My definition of feminism in-
cludes a rejection of the patriarchal money
system. Your definition of feminism dis-
criminates against housewives.
4) No, and I never could and never
will!!! I'm not a masochist!!
Some of these answers may seem to
contradict each other and sound hypo-
critical, and the "liberated woman" part is
the stickiest. Oh well — I don't have it all
figured out yet, but I'll keep working on it.
Incidentally, you can use my full name. . .
Bridget Reilly isn't even my "real" name,
and certainly not the one anyone else in SF
knew me by. I only invented it after I
moved to Boston. I had found that
"passing for Irish" was a very handy way
to get around in this part of the country.
Heh, heh, hehl)
Love, Bridget — Boston
Dear PW,
Jake hit on a very common theme for
women of our day in "Sweet Relief" [PW
#13]. I know there is boredom and fantasti-
cal hopes involved in what seems the flow
of life out there.
I have spent my entire summer concen-
trating on my mind while my body has
remained alienated from others. No sex in
two months and the men that come on
don't turn me on. Food obsessions provide
sensational pleasure; and as a recovering
anorexic- bulimiac I know the eat and eat
and be thin conflict. It is a social problem
for which women must develop alterna-
tives.
Affirming that the curvature of flesh is
admirable. Demonstrating the supportive
and accepting friendships formed by
groups of committed women.
Thanks for addressing the issue,
Sweet Visions
Dear PW:
Your magazine has been a source of pro-
found joy for me since I discovered it with
PW #6. It's good to know there are other
alienated androids out there, and that
some of them are thinking of alternative
futures.
I have a "good job" as a word processor
with Bank of America. Everyone at BofA
these days is talking about cutting the "fat
and waste" out of our operating expenses,
and making the organization more "effi-
cient and productive."
This translates as: Hire too few
employees to handle the workload, don't
spend the necessary funds to give them the
right tools, make them come in early, work
all day without breaks, then ask them to
stay late and come in on weekends too.
As the only word processing operator
PROCESSED WORLD #15
serving approximately 20 managers, I'm
constantly having jobs shoved in front of
my face, invariably classified RUSH or
URGENT. Each manager feels that his/her
job is more important than anyone else's,
that whatever I'm doing now should be
dropped immediately so theirs can be done
right away.
In contrast with my last job, where the
managers always made sure the operators
took scheduled coffee and lunch breaks,
nobody ever asks if you've had lunch yet at
BofA. The prevailing feeling here is
"there's too much work to go to lunch." To
stop work at any time for any reason is just
not part of the company spirit.
Most of these documents are of sur-
prisingly little substance. Vague narratives
about the need to develop new products
and improve profits, in which great atten-
tion is focused on fancy, artistic format-
ting, but which contain no real 'meat and
potatoes' ideas on how to achieve these
goals are continuously churned out for end-
less 'presentations.' Ideas which could
easily be expressed with a couple of
paragraphs of simple text are turned into
complex charts and diagrams. My constant
pleading for equipment better suited to
these special, difficult formats are always
turned down because they would cost too
much at a time when "we really need to cut
our expenses," yet my department
changed its name four times in the six
months, a very expensive process, since all
the stationery, e.g., letterhead, business
cards, note pads, etc. bearing the old
department name must be destroyed and
new ones printed.
Never have I worked anyplace where
everyone is so frantically busy and working
so hard at doing nothing!
I'd personally love to distribute PW and
help sow dissent among the other workers
at the orifice, but I find it's very difficult to
have any conversations with anyone at
BofA about important things, like values,
politics or alternative lifestyles. Seems
everyone is really paranoid about losing
their jobs, so the conversation is limited to
mundane talk about the weather, sports,
how busy everyone is, or plans for the
weekend.
I do my job well, I guess, since I'm one of
the very few employees who didn't get laid
off despite my junior status in a recent
series of departmental budget cuts.
Nobody seems to suspect that inside I'm
seething with boredom and secretly
subscribe to Processed World.
As with everyone else at PW, the
paycheck keeps me from being another one
of the homeless, sleeping on heating
grates, and lets me have a little spare time
and money to do things I consider worth-
while.
I would love to hear from anyone at PW
who has creative ideas for alternatives to
the corporate orifice drag, especially more
about worker owned collectives, or har-
nessing computer and automation techno-
logy in the interests of the people, to
eliminate boring, mundane work for
humans and create a society of abundance
and 100% unemployment for everyone.
Sincerely,
JF.
Dear PW,
Well alright #14, special theme, graphic
possibilities, and trials 'n tribulations...
hmmmm... Anyway, thank you 4 sending
the World and of course i love it 4 the hope
it suggests. But you must realize that what
is being discussed is not the process(ion)
away from capital or state socialist
bondage. Yes, indeed the process of
raising consciousness is of course the
essence of change. . .and yet the sad truth is
that one does not do something by merely
talking about it. Especially the matter of
making one's misery public — which also
serves to sensitize the naive to a repertoire
of repercussions. Well you might ask:
What future?? And, the repeated reifica-
tions regarding the creation of alternatives
cannot be realized with the conventions of
symbolic/semi-resisters (i.e. "this ain't no
party. This ain't no disco."). To really
begin "developing positive solutions" it is
necessary to comprehend the problem — in
this case, bondage and addiction to the
commodities and accoutrements of ma-
terialism. However, for the matter of
movement comes those considerations
regarding motives and objectives. NO
mass psychotherapy nor consciousness
raising will suffice to achieve anything but
collectivization, in which case the criticism
of a "tyranny of the working class" will
become grimly evident (those of you with
camp, military or prison experience may
recall what such organizations engender).
And this was/iz the point of the obser-
vation that even such as you exemplify and
display those mannerisms or characteris-
tics of the authoritarian. The point iz to
realize that however creative/cleverly com-
municated exhortations to awaken and live
a life in celebration of spontaneity — it will
not actually happen until the choice and
movements are made — the reinforcements
of a status quo are more familiar and
consistent. And the dictum "Arbeit Macht
White Flag #2
Rimbaud vs. Rambo
Brutal Pen
Slashes words barking
Across the jungle
Goddammit ruining the point.
Linda Thomas
Frei" is nonetheless what the procession is
all about — no "invention," just realiza-
tions that some 'things' about the urbane
proletariat are constant. No matter the size
or color the magazines it is still instruction/
inducement to conform... But do tell us
more!
Onward with Love,
Obiter Dictum
Folsom Prison
Hello to those of Processed World,
Here I sit listening to the sound of
jack-hammers and non-operational air-
cooling units. The terminal faces the door
side of the "laundry." Moldering red
brick, slightly sway-backed sides, rein-
forced by steel rods and plates bolted
together; primer grey steel bars set into
sandstone with a wire mesh overlay. The
printer is playing its grating tune with tiny
whistles and beeps interspersed to keep
me from forgetting: it is just a machine. I
munch a carrot in between sentences and
wish I had brought more to this chamber of
electronic deliberation. "Deliberation"
This thought is one I hestitate to examine.
According to the dictionary: Liberate =
To set free, as from oppression, confine-
ment, or foreign control. Deliberate = 1. a.
Planned in advance: premeditated, b. Said
or done intentionally. 2. Careful and
thorough in deciding or determining. 3.
Leisurely or slow in motion or manner.
So, here I sit, in this room of careful
consideration, premeditated intentions and
plenty of background noise. Conversations
in New Yorkese rolling across the voids
between terminals. Chicago adds another
dimension. Why, I ask the CRT, is
deliberation not an obvious opposite of
liberation? Why is this word, an obvious
negation, buried behind a meaning of
propriety and thoughtfulness? Inflate:de-
flate; encode:decode; insist:desist; em-
bark:debark; . . . .liberate:deliberate
So, here I sit, carefully, premeditatedly,
sometimes leisurely and sometimes not,
consciously — de-liberating — myself by the
act of interacting with this techno-object.
It is not uncommon to watch prisoners sit
in front of these screens and de-liberate
themselves into an oblivious state. One in
which time and motion take on secondary
or almost unconscious tertiary relations.
The eyes become a bit glazed from the
green hue of the display, instructions pass
from one terminal to another by word of
mouth and the eyes never leave the screen,
as if the ability to speak is granted by its
PROCESSED WORLD #15
very greenness..
On occasion, a person, or thing, or being
of limited consciousness and often less
conscience, will enter and yell a name into
the midst of the glazed expressions.
Repressed hostility, behind green eyes,
flaunted without care at the being who
dares interrupt this de-liberating process.
A servant of the state is left with a foul
taste, always, when he/she interrupts or
intrudes upon this process. The servants
have no way of understanding. They have
little knowledge or ability to interact with
the CRT and fear it; an extension of the
fear of those in communication with it.
"Communicants." We, who sit here before
you, are communicants. We are commun-
ing our deliberation across the synapses
and into the plastic keys to the locks on the
transfers to the box with the fan in it and
the little thing that looks like a record.
At what point does de-liberation become
liberation? At what point does knowledge
and the desire to know become a
deliberating process? Habilitaterdehabili-
tate
The little box with the fan spins the
current around and sends it back to the
CRT. I look at it and know that I did it
deliberately. It was planned, not spontan-
eous, studied and ordered pressing of the
keys that has placed me deep within this
green space. No peace, just space. Ripping
through the a- noon like some kind of
plague without a victim and starving for a
resting spot, my thoughts are caught like a
speck of dust in a cross wind. Shot with
anxiety, knowing the time is approaching
for separation from this electrical reflector
of our own remorse. Yes, I did say
remorse. Well, O.K., write — not — say
But I did say it to myself. Honest. I can
hear it very plainly. As clearly as the
snappy plastic sound of these keys as I
watch my fingers trip across them. Yes,
trip... and watch. Not always, but enough
so that it is noticeable to a real typist. I'll
•never make it as a data person. I'll never
be a real keyboard racer. I always have to
look. I mean, why not, they're just right
there, one little glance away.
The beings that represent the State are
busily readying themselves to disconnect
us from our communal attractions. We, the
communcants, are beginning to fidget in
our seats. Our sweaty bottoms stuck to the
chairs' plastic covers; my shorts tangled in
my crotch from constant shifting in the
chair. The rush for last minute print-outs is
on. Like a small orgasm, one can feel the
relief that sighs through the room as one
after another finds that — there was just
enough time to have the printout run.
Without the printout, a small form of terror
would grow. With the printout, vast things
are possible. A little piece of the
de-liberation is carried away, back to the
cell. The beings of the State will look at
them and squint their eyes (in wonder and
think terrible things about these rumina-
tions on paper with holes on the sides.
Blank staring eyes and dead screens
show themselves as nothing more than
that, dead screens. Only the faces of the
communicants, their lips curled back from
their recent separation, reveals the pain
beneath the scowls. We file out the door
towards the cells and the inevitable
counting of our bodies. Always being
counted for something. Always
We have been separated from our de-
liberations by the iniquities of a State, that
doesn't realize just how immersed in our
communing we have become. Why must
we be separated? We could de-liberate so
much better if we could take the eye and
the keyboard to the cell with us. Is there a
way out of here through the eye? The
beings of the State seem to watch us so
strangely when we work here and
commune in green.
Do you await your time of electrical
communing as if there was just a bit more
involved than pressing keys and arranging
data?
The sun is approaching the dim position
and the barred windows are lost in shadow.
I must turn away from the screen. I must
do it. Or else, or else, I won't be allowed to
commune with it later.
L.W. —Leavenworth Penitentiary, KS
Dear PW,
Congratulations on your new format. We
are adding you to our "recommended
reading" section. It's encouraging to see
that not everyone has failed into the blind
acceptance of modern technology trap.
Since January of 1984, we have been
attempting to convey to people the concept
of technology used AGAINST the indivi-
dual through a monthly newsletter called
2600. Such developments as electronic
switching systems, which are able to
compile quite a bit of data on each of us by
recording what numbers we call and when;
FBI lists; credit data that paints a very
pretty picture of our lifestyles; and so on.
We also believe that each and every one of
us has every right to know EXACTLY what
this technology is being used for and how it
works. We print this information because
we want our readers to keep thinking and
asking questions.
We had a computer bulletin board
system; it wasn't hard for the authorities to
confiscate it and ust the excuse that it was
being used to move satellites in the sky!
Incredible but true. This lack of under-
standing can be and has been used to hurt
us and it will get much worse if we don't
keep our wits about us.
If any of your readers have any advice for
us or would like to read what we've been
saying, our address is 2600, Box 752,
Middle Island, NY 11953.
Sincerely,
The Folks at 2600
(516)751-2600
Dear PW,
I have been reading PW since the first
issue and I thought that #14 was the best so
far. I definitely prefer the expanded size
which allows for more lengthy articles and
more thorough discussion. This issue
demonstrated the merits of a magazine
with vague, unspecified parameters.
Where else could I find articles about Lego
politics, office politics at Hewlett-Packard,
and poetry all in the same binding? You
will always attract a wide and energetic
circle of correspondents as long as you
continue to print bold articles like "Equal
Opportunity Parents: Just How Equal Can
We Be?"
In particular, I was drawn to F.L.'s letter
and the debate it provoked within PW. She
raised some points that were carefully
avoided by most of your responses: that the
authoritarian structure of our society "is
only symptomatic of the real problem...
individuals have insulated themselves from
the mess that it is in." Most leftists do not
want to hear that, and would like to ignore
the fact that "the Masses," ourselves
included, are actively complicit with the
authoritarian social structure.
In response to this point, (that most
people are indiscriminate slaves to any
ideology that will "liberate" them from
having to make decisions and bearing
responsibility for the consequences), Louis
Michaelson says F.L. is "blaming the
victim." Med-o says "it's all too clear that
the primary cause of our misery is inter-
national capitalism, both corporate and
state sponsored." Ana Logue agrees: "For
it is capitalism itself and its reduction of
life to the pursuit of profit that is the cause
of our dissatisfaction."
None of the writers from PW chose to
investigate the implications of what F.L.
was really saying: that most of us act
irrationally (not in our own best interests)
and that it is the character structure of the
average person that forms the strongest
basis for authoritarian societies.
You cannot impose freedom on people
who are shaken to the core with fear of
freedom.
There is, to be sure, a symbiotic
relationship between capitalism and the
people who are " sold on it . " However, any
theory about objective conditions and their
effects on my life which robs me of my
responsibility for my own situation is point-
less. We all share an unconscious desire to
be led out of our misery rather than making
the decisions necessary to change it our-
selves, and accept the consequences.
Med-o touched upon the undercurrent of
psychology bound up in this issue. But his
sarcasm betrayed his contempt for sexual-
ity: "I guess all we need is mass psycho-
therapy to set things straight."
We don't want to understand the roots of
irrational behavior. We need to grasp those
roots before we can hope to rationalize
social power.
PROCESSED WORLD #15
Recently I discovered a technique of
critical thinking called "character analy-
sis" developed by Wilhelm Reich. Charac-
ter analysis involves breaking through the
patient's social facade and chronic muscle
tension with the goal of achieving a unity
between inner emotions and outward
expression. This is the flip side of Marx's
conception of "alienation."
People who are in sexual stasis over a
period of years develop chronic neurosis,
that is, they cling to an irrational set of
behaviors. A boy who is circumcised at
birth by those to whom he looks for love
and guidance does not develop a castration
"fantasy," he lives in real, paralyzing fear
that he will be attacked in the genitals.
Thus adults accustom themselves to an
overwhelming feeling of powerlessness
and impotence, both socially and sexually.
I don't want to stick my balls out.
The neurosis is fed literally from
dammed up sexual energy. Sexual grati-
fication—a rare commodity — is replaced
with activities that deaden the emotions
and weaken the heart: war, pilferage, rape,
intellectual specialization and religion. A
vicious cycle in which we spin from op-
pression to repression, never questioning
how to get out.
I feel psychic contact with my friends
only infrequently. The party chit-chat and
worktime bullshitting never seem to
scratch beneath the surface of a seething
emotional sea. I feel that this lack of
contact has something directly to do with
the fact that we so rarely taste emotional
eruptions along with the attendant risks
and satisfactions.
Most people I know privately admit this
same frustration. And I also sense an
unsaid, unspeakable unhappiness with the
state of their love affairs. This fundamental
unhappiness of all unhappinesses, loss of
sexual power, finds its mirror in our daily
political reality: watching fascism reclaim
"our country's manhood."
As Med-o points out, we are all
disturbed sexually. Girls are raped by their
fathers one in four times. Boys are
routinely circumcised on a mass scale. The
real basis for the subjective misery and
isolation we all feel is to be found in our
brutalized organs of love. Not only were
most of us treated to a cold tit, but we
learned to suck it with relish.
The inability to love cuts through every
level of public and private life. Love-
starved people begin to "numb out" in a
variety of ways. We simply cannot tolerate
the feeling of tension between our desires
and our real situations. We take drugs,
enter political groups, obey orders. We are
neurotic because we do not want to feel
what is happening to us. My penis is
scarred, I carry my shield, I fear excitation,
it weakens my defenses.
Whether we are in a couple relationship,
a menage a trois, a promiscuous lifestyle or
whatever, most of us will admit a private
Can You Recognize A TERRORIST?
Do You Know The Difference Between:
A Terrorist,
and...
A Freedom-Fighter?
Hostages,
and...
Political Prisoners?
Bombing An Embassy,
and...
Mining A
Foreign Harbor?
Nationalist Fanatics,
and...
Patriotic Citizens?
:•:•:■:•
For More Information, Contact the Terrorist Hotline (415) 986-0145
dissatisfaction with our level of contact
with our lovers and the world. This is
symptomatic of real fear of loving and
being loved, which has a direct relationship
with our inability to self-manage our lives.
We become rigid, dogmatic, and unable to
swim freely in the ocean of life. We spend
enormous amounts of time and energy on
neurotic conflicts within ourselves and
have' no energy to build a better place to
live in. Then we see the authoritarian social
structure as something alien to us, as if it
didn't mirror perfectly our own authori-
tarian character structures. Our inability to
make contact with our lovers finds its
perfection in our inability to unite as
workers.
"Toilet training runs deep," a friend of
mine said.
J.M. -Oakland, CA
PROCESSED WORLD #15
Dear PW.
1 just received PW «14 and enjoyed
reading it especially "A Day In The Life of
Emplo\ ee 85292.
1 have been unemployed since March of
this year, a victim of the declining
"computer technology" industry in NYC. I
was laid-off twice this year by companies
unable to hack it in The Big Apple. One of
these was a poorly funded developer of a
special effects generator One day the
owner tells me that I'll be working for the
duration of my project, the next das bis
crony lavs me off. The other company was
the educational superstar, Sesame Street 1
worked there for over a year developing an
educational game: non-competitive, non
violent, non-sexist, non-fun. It was how-
ever a programmers' paradise; surrounded
by interesting non programmers, friendly
managers and a budget to buy experi-
mental hardware. But then no one could
foresee the consumer flocking to buy VCRs
in preference to a Commodore 64 and the
last of us were given notice (not before
most of the experimental equipment was
taken; vultures from other departments,
smelling blood, descended on our offices).
This was the conclusion to a regular series
..I layoffs and corporate re orgs that had
begun a month after 1 started working
there over a year ago. However to keep
their conscience clear and public image
unblemished a generous severance pack-
age is given to each laid-off employee. In
lacl no matter how bad things got around
i he office no one quit, in the hope of
getting laid off.
\i an\ rate enclosed is the most recent
,ssue ol Silicon Daze [a nice underground
zinc I r„m SYC 365 Adelphi St #2,
lirooklyn .VI' U23H]
P.K.-Brooklvn
Hello again.
The S.H.I. T. test [printed on this page]
is from a recently formed faggot affinity
group, made for Boston's Lesbian and Gay
Pride march. The background includes the
Department of Social Services, the ever so-
liberal governor, and the Massachusetts
legislature deciding that only "traditional
families" are appropriate homes for foster
and adoptive kids. It started out as
unadulterated homophobia, and has turned
into fairly out-and-out slams against single
and working mothers. Further background
includes a plea on the part of Pride
Celebrations, Inc., that we queers be
aware of our "image" in the upcoming
march — oops, parade. If spending hour
upon hour over my sewing machine for a
demure little pink and lace number isn't
being aware of my image I'd like to know
what is, but they tell me that's not what
was intended.
I left issue 13 at the laundromat, could
you please send me another?
Love,
R.W.- Boston
had enough SHIT?-
Important: Use only number 69 lead pencil. Fill the squares completely. Do not mark more than one answer.
You will be penalized for unanswered questions or correct party lines Fill in birthdate. social security
number, federal homosexual identity number, and sun sign in the spaces provided. Be prepared to present
three photo IDs; out-of-state licenses are not valid. No open-toe shoes. No jeans. Must be over 21 to enter.
Void yourself where prohibited by law.
/
THE STATE'S HOMOSEXUAL INQUISITION TEST
1. The traditional family consists of:
□ a) husband, wife, child and divorce
attorney
□ b) a talking refrigerator, a microwave
oven, and a vegomatic
□ c) two fags
D d) one fag and a bottle of poppers
2. D.S.S. is an abbreviation for:
□ a) Disruptive Social Services
□ b) Desperately Seeking Susan
□ c) Dukakis' Standards Suck
□ d) Dyke Sexual Superiority
I
HOMO ID
3. The most important components of good
parenting are:
□ a) pantyhose and stiletto heels
□ b) Cabbage Patch dolls and a big
backyard «
□ c) dykes and fags |
□ d) Barbie and Ken
I
4. A man is abnormal if:
U a) his lipstick and fingernail polish clash
□ b) he smokes while he's in the shower
□ c) he takes up less than three feet of
space around him when he walks
down the street
□ d) he has the words "fuchsia" and
"beaded curtains" in his vocabulary
I
I
5 A woman is abnormal if:
] a) she owns a hammer
b) she is not pregnant
c) she wins an argument with a man
(.1) she can't clean the house and cook
the dinner after work before she
helps the kids with their homework,
bathes them and puts them to bed so
thai her husband can have a little
peace and quiet after a long, hard
day
6. A healthy family environment would
encourage kids to:
□ a) eat their vegetables
LJ b) learn their lessons good
D c) ask Beth
U d) respect both of their mothers equally
test administered by
C.R.A.P. Testing Service
Committee to Re-establish Absolute Patriarchy
GCN Box U.F.C. ; 167 Tremont St. ; Boston, MA 02111
Tests must be returned with financial contributions!
xxxxyxxxxA/
we have too
UNITED FRUIT COMPANY
a bunch of radical gay men
working to reinfuse the gay/lesbian movement with the spirit and
militancy of its origins as part of a broad-based progressive move-
ment We hope to combat D.S.S., Reaganism, South Africa, the war
in Central America, Coors Beer (we could go on and on . ..) with
inspiration, creativity, and a sense of humor. Contact us at the
abo\ e address.
PROCESSED WORLD #15
Skeleton-a ballad
Skeleton in baggy red drawstring pants
walking down the Ave
no shirt
drawstring tight around hip bon
Skeleton walks up to young businessman
at bus stop
(jacket off, sleeves rolled up hairy forearms)
pats his finger phalanges
on 50% polyester shoulder
says
"Hove you".
Up the Ave
toe phalanges lightly scrape calcium
on the concrete
turns in the glass doors
the head receptionist
she's the "office squeeze" —
her and the vice-prez are squeezing more
out of each other
than her words-per-minute would warrant —
his sockets swallow her brown eyes
as he pronounces
"I love you".
At the corner
bus exhaust goes right through him
but no lungs for cancer
the wind goes right through him
but he's not cold —
he's hungry
(and not much time to eat)
— Into McCarcass
no red meat though
orders a fishburger First bite
— squirt
tartar sauce drips down his ribs.
Staring at his thin reflection
in the window as he leaves
thinking
"what would my face look like — if 1 had one?"
"thick or thin lips — if I had any?"
— sudden skateboard whizzes by. skeleton bends at the knees
slightly and hops on, whoah! this the way to bang down that
torturous trail into hell! this the way to skid down the banks
of that grey smoldering river. This the way to — whoah! — rips past
a cash machine, some winter clearance sales, a barber shop,
used record store, a store specializing in contraceptives right
next to a funeral home. 2 Japanese restaurants an Irish bar and a
taqueria, a man on the post office steps answering philosophical
questions for a quarter and a thin blind woman behind a guitar
singing love songs to the clouds, everybody's got a purchase in
one hand and some change in the other, another cash machine a
white-haired lady pulling out two $20 bills, spray-painted on the
wall next to her — "Ejaculate The State!", the tattoo parlor where
last week skeleton had etched into his radius and ulna tiny letters
that when he turn his wrist in, the bones'cross and the words
touch, like a kiss: "I love***you"....
down down down, down down...
down down down...
....now arriving on the edge
of the industrial zone
all the buildings square
fish canneries
experimental stations
the sun
shorting out at the horizon
like a bad connection
yellow lights
in the big parking lot
flicker on.
Skeleton back on solid ground
but not for long —
starts climbing up that stack over there
to the top.
Hard not to get feet
stuck in crevices oops —
step lightly don't break anything oops-
snaps like kindling.
Finds his spot
neatly folds himself up twice
like all the rest of 'em
neatly
tailbone sittin' on heelbone
skull bowed down to kneecap
kneecap in the jaw
rows of kneecaps
rows of white domes empty gaze...
...occipital... parietal... frontal... ethmoid.
like continents
like memories
like cathedrals
like upside-down cereal bowls
in the dish drain!
ws of white domes empty gaze..
remember?... you were there once...
up on top
of the tall stack
of skeletons.
Harvey Stein
PROCESSED WORLD #15
In the last Processed World, several staffers took a shot at answering some readers' questions
about our future visions and our preferences for organizational models. In this issue we are continuing
the form of a collective editorial, and this time our subject is the omnipresent fear of AIDS -an issue
particularly compelling in our city of San Francisco
QUARANTINE CORNER
■■They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and
formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything
like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences
the exchange of views- They fancied themselves pee and no one
will ever be free so long as there are pestilences. "
— The Plague, Albert Camus
■■Around the country, gay establishments or those that attract or
hire many gays report business is falling.
-The Wall Street Journal, 10/10/85
^r
MAXINEHOLZ
Fear of AIDS has become deeply em-
bedded in the American psyche. In the
popular consciousness, AIDS is compar-
able to the Bubonic Plague that wiped out
from Vi to Vi of the European population
during the Middle Ages. The dread of
AIDS takes many forms. It ranges from the
organized militance of parents concerned
for the welfare of their children, to the
ubiquitous office joke accompanied by
nervous laughter. (Jokes are always a ther-
mometer of popular uneasiness.) Does the
anxiety around AIDS simply reflect the
healthy concern for a devastating disease
with unknown causes, or is it some sort of
mass neurosis?
Let's put this danger into perspective.
The chances of catching AIDS by casual
contact are statistically infinitessimal com-
pared with the chances, say of a frequent
flyer getting killed in an airplane accident,
not to speak of the chance of anyone
getting killed driving on the freeway. If the
problem was really simply a matter of
possibility of severe impairment of facul-
ties or death, then why aren't people up in
arms about all these other things? The
harmful effects of radioactive waste or
toxic dumps on our health are far more
certain and scientifically understood than
the effects of sharing a meal with someone
with AIDS.
Those who advocate extreme precaution
against catching AIDS (quarantines of
victims, screening for AIDS virus at
workplaces) must recognize that they are
tailing for a degree of surveillance and
10
social control that would lead to unpre-
cedented invasions of privacy. The price
would be very high, not only for individual
victims or carriers of AIDS and high-risk
groups, but for the society as a whole,
because everyone is guilty (or infected)
until proven innocent (or "clean").
Why is the militance around AIDS so
exaggerated? The main difference between
AIDS and other social maladies is that
AIDS is known to be transmissable via
intimate contact with another infected
human being. Actually, the cause of
environmental pollution, industrial acci-
dents, etc., is ultimately human activity,
just as AIDS is a result of human activity of
a specific type.
But unlike the former, which appear as
unfortunate side effects of apparently
immutable production processes, AIDS
immediately evokes the murky world of
lustful physical contact between sensuate
bodies It raises questions of personal and
sexual "hygiene," arousing the traditional
American puritanical horror of bodih
secretions For many, AIDS isn't just a
punishment for homosexuality, but for
sexual pleasure for its own sake.
Fear of AIDS is the fear of others, the
fear of being invaded by another whom one
is aware of as a lustful animal, the fear of
someone else's sins rubbing off on you
In this way, AIDS dread contributes to a
general climate of terror and isolation, of
distrust for one's neighbor (who might
have AIDS, just as he might be a child
molestor or a rapist). And of course, AIDS
is directly linked to more traditional
militant "hysterias"— against promiscu-
ity, homosexuality and anal sex, prosti-
(ution, drugs and pornography. The
—¥r-
obsessions with AIDS dovetails nicely with
the general climate of moral crusading.
And so the cycle viciously closes in on
itself. The anxiety of losing control leads to
a paradoxical desire for more order and
soual control— not to gam meaning and
coherence in our social lives, but to lessen
the influence of the potentially harmful
Other. The result is the opposite: the more
we give in to our helplessness and our
desires for some authority to solve our
problems, the more we relinquish our
capacity for freedom and action.
Concern and collective action around
AIDS has provided support for victims of
the disease and their loved ones, and
pressured the authorities to conduct rele-
vant research. But as part of a campaign of
fear and ostracization, anti-AIDS militance
leads to isolation, paranoia, a paralyzing
fear of others, and a strengthening of
authoritarian tendencies within our societ)
and within ourselves.
PAX A LOURDE
I'm in a bad mood. 1 come out of the
Metro station and hear someone exhorting
"You don'i «ani to catch AIDS, do you'"
Aggressive, hoarse, mean— "You don t
want to catch AIDS, do you?"
1 see a woman and a man passing out a
kallei headlined, Spread Panic, Not
AIDS
Nauseous with rage, I think, "Be cool,
you don't know who you're dealing with.
|usi calmly take a leaflet and go on up to
work." I walk up to the woman. My rage
PROCESSED WORLD #15
blooms. I seize her entire stack and throw it
to the paV?ment.
"Hey pal," she shouts.
The guy yells, "That man has AIDS."
The leaflet, put out by a fascist group
(and we're not just whistling Deutschland
Uber Alles) has a vicious agenda: compul-
sory blood tests for all food handlers,
service workers, school teachers; intensive
research institutes where AIDS patients
can be brought to be treated in isolation;
admittance to these institutions would at
first be voluntary, until "public health
officials determine that more compulsory
quarantine measures are needed" (would a
concentration camp by any other name
smell so rank?).
I need to remind myself that I'm not in
high school anymore. I won't, don't stand
for the physical and psychic beatings that
come from being a faggot in straight
society. I have been attacked, called
unclean, diseased, socially unacceptable.
But now I have a better self image, friends
I can talk to, community resources to
mobilize. I start with the people in the
office.
Jane arrives shortly after me. Kind-
hearted, emotionally open Jane. "Did you
see those leaflets?"
"Oh, I never take leaflets. But I did see
those all over the sidewalk. Those people
sure are messy. You know what I think? I
think we're all going to catch it. The virus
is mutating you know. Pretty soon it's
going to be airborne, just like the common
cold. And that guy they elected, what's his
name, Ray-gun [contempt in her voice]
he's just not putting enough money into
research."
However, Jane remains compassionate.
A coworker of her lover's has AIDS. His
company, a savings and loan bank, has
been having special AIDS awareness
workshops for its employees. At the work-
shops, doctors assure that the disease is
not contagious as well as going over how to
have low-risk sex. Still, the coworker's
boss is 'freaked out' and harasses him with
every trick in the Supervisor's Manual for
Mental Cruelty. Jane's lover is doing what
he can to help the coworker — confronting
the supervisor directly, complaining to the
supervisor's boss, being an emotionally
supportive friend to the sufferer. Jane
staunchly feels that the supervisor is
malevolent, her lover correct, the company
enlightened. But she continues to think, no
matter what she is told about the statistical
improbability, that the virus is about to
break out and become dangerously con-
tagious.
My identity is besieged. I remember the
week before at a demonstration at a
building for a company that ships military
supplies to El Salvador. In a moment* of
outrage I spit on the windows and say,
"Here, have some of my AIDS." I am
stunned at this expression of self-hatred
and drift off, depressed. I realize the
hatred, mistrust, fear in me. Who should I
be angry at, who should I blame?
At a Processed World meeting, some-
body spouts the idea that perhaps AIDS
hysteria has an element of common sense.
People are right to mistrust the medical
authorities — "Much as I want to believe
them on the AIDS issue, why should I trust
the same public health officials who tell me
it's OK to go back into a PCB-soaked
building?" I think about this question...
Scientific findings are not objective;
scientific 'fact' always contains a degree of
interpretation influenced by politics, by
attitudes towards nature and the body, by
all kinds of quirks. The gay community has
fought the scientific and medical establish-
ment in an unprecedented way. We've
analyzed the research, both as lay people
and as professionals; we've demanded
more research money; we've insisted on
scientific cooperation rather than competi-
tion; we've forced policy makers to pay
attention to the more nearly true than what
is politically or financially expedient. If
workers were organized in similar ways to
independently research and contest the
official dictum of the public health depart-
ment, we might see different inter-
pretations of what constitutes a safe work-
place.
Despite the horror of an unchecked AIDS
epidemic, there are some real and potential
silver linings:
• Other common diseases that are
distinctly modern — cancers, strange aller-
gies — originate in breakdown of the
immune system. If positively handled,
AIDS research, and public response to that
research, could lead to an expanded aware-
ness of the cause of such breakdowns,
including the role of environmental ha-
zards, mental stress, physical overexer-
tion, depleted nutrition.
• The gay community's internal res-
ponse to the crisis has been an amazing
example of mutual aid. Community funded
hospice programs provide emotional and
practical support for the dying. Gay writers
have produced a body of sustaining fiction,
poetry, drama. We have produced fund-
raising benefits to suit every range of
cultural affinity and bankbook, from grand
nights at the opera to funky little Paul
Goodman study groups. And what is also
important and touching, we are kinder,
more tender with each other. The
experience of death coming quickly and
early to our friends, acquaintances, public
figures make us realize how precious each
other's lives really are, how petty are many
of the differences...
I never was able to imagine myself
having AIDS. Then one night I dream. I am
marked by Kaposi's Sarcoma, a skin cancer
associated with AIDS. I arise from my sick
bed and go out into the street. I force
the world to confront my experience, my
identity. Frankly, I see people shrinking
away in terror. Frankly, I am terrified by
myself. I wake up in fright, but I soon
realize I have been to that worst place. I
can now venture back to resolution.
ANA LOGUE
Junkies in a shooting gallery partake of
pleasure or gain relief from a shared
needle. Six years later, a child is refused
entry to a school on the grounds that the
disease she was born with is not curable,
even though there is no reason to believe
her condition is casually contagious. Her
case, and those of other children like her,
becomes an international cause celebre,
even the president is expected to have an
opinion on it.
Years from now high school and college
students will write papers on children with
AIDS comparing their case to the intern-
ment of the Japanese or the Dreyfus affair.
The titles will read: "Hysteria and Social
Policy," "Isolation vs. Contamination," or
"Howard Hughes, Model American."
If one could only get AIDS by sharing a
needle or as a foetus in an infected womb, I
do not believe the disease would capture
the world's attention, no matter how many
people died. Nor would it probably catch
the excitement of the medical community.
Medical care and research are pretty
much up for grabs in our free economy,
with the diseases of the rich and powerful
receiving more attention and money than
those of the poor and powerless. Thus, the
U.S. has practically staked its national
honor on finding cures for heart disease
and cancer, which attack the rich as well as
the poor, while taking a much more casual
approach to the problems of inadequate
prenatal care, malnutrition, and occupa-
tional diseases. AIDS as a disease of
intravenous drug users and their children
would probably receive as high a priority as
the diseases of migrant farm workers
poisoned by pesticides.
But, as we all know, AIDS is also spread
through sexual contact, and it is especially
prevalent in the gay community, where,
rumor has it, there is an awful lot of sex
going on. ("Ex Straight Claims, i Get Laid
a Lot More as a Gay!' " Did I just imagine
this headline, or did I read it in the
Enquirer?) But thanks to the articulateness
and political savvy of some gays, AIDS is
getting the attention it deserves as an
epidemic disease. Who knows how many
lives have and will be saved just as a result
of the public awareness efforts initiated by
the gay press?
Who knows how many lives have and
will be destroyed by the irresponsible and
sensationalist mass media? ("Movie Stars
Refuse On Screen Kisses," "High School
Boy Gives Sweetheart Kiss of Death,"
"AIDS Scare Cancels Prom," did I read
these headlines of am I making them up?)
PROCESSED WORLD #15
11
A kid whose mother died of AIDS and who
will probably not live to adolescence cannot
go to school. Some nurses refuse to care for
patients with AIDS unless they are allowed
to wear protective masks and gloves.
I take my chances, ride subway trains
and crowded buses, mingle with the
coughing, sneezing mob. I worry about
earthquakes and being killed or maimed in
a car accident. I am not afraid of flying.
When I die, I hope I leave behind
something better than fear.
STEVE C.
How many people today would say that
the job is a producer of stress? For many,
headaches, sleeplessness, fatigue, anxiety
and manifest behavioral disorders like
alcoholism and drug abuse — and many
forms of domestic violence — result from
dealing with the job. Add to these maladies
unrelieved stress and one can certainly
understand how an immune system
weakens. But are jobs considered as
contributing to AIDS?
For AIDS patients, the attitudes that
others have regarding AIDS must influence
their day-to-day feelings. People should
not be led to believe that they are at fault
for the AIDS problem. But being sensitive
to the needs of others is not a dominant
trait of the powers that be. Most major
newspapers and TV networks make under-
standing AIDS more difficult and more
easily propagate stereotypes. Classifica-
tion serves not only to group pathologically
related factors, but translates psychologi-
cal and social phenomena into superordi-
nate causal categories of disease.
Basing our response to AIDS on the
information we receive from popular press,
TV, and radio gives us a fuzzy picture of
the problem. Embedded in messages at
regular intervals we are told that AIDS is a
result of deviance. It is then easy to
generalize the form (i.e. deviance) and
align with the communicator. Information
that fixes the cause of AIDS in certain
modes of behavior reinforces conservative
messages about self and society.
DENNIS HA YES
The horror of contracting AIDS is upon
us. But unless a new, casually transmitted
strain of AIDS emerges, most of us have
less to fear from AIDS than from AIDS
Phobia, a pestilence of fear that has begun
to resemble the mass psychology of segre-
gation and internment.
AIDS Phobia owes much to misinfor-
mation regarding AIDS transmission.
Researchers and doctors insist that casual
contraction of AIDS is almost impossible,
that for the virus to spread, an AIDS
victim's blood, semen, or saliva must come
into direct contact with another's blood-
stream — e.g., like hepatitis, through a
dirty needle, or during anal intercourse,
through capillaries in the rectal lining.
Statistics confirm this insistence; in fact,
the deadly virus may no longer be
spreading the way some fear it is.
According to a report in Harper's (Oct.
'85), the numbers of AIDS patients are
doubling every year. The current number
is about 14,000. But the numbers are
doubling within the high risk groups (gay
men, intravenous drug users), not among
the general population.
Only 6-7% of AIDS cases affect the
"general population," and these are the
lightning rods for AIDS Phobia. Research
refuses to yield the AIDS transmission
routes for these groups. But the stigmas of
homosexuality and IV drug use mean that
some AIDS victims are "high risks" who
decline the association. We just don't know
how vulnerable the rest of us are to AIDS.
More importantly, AIDS is spreading
mainly among those already infected but
not yet AIDS symptomatic. AIDS symp-
toms may surface six years after an initial
infection. The projected yearly doubling of
AIDS victims disproportionately includes
those already infected — up to a million,
says the Center for Disease Control in
Atlanta — e.g. up to 50% of S.F.'s gay male
population, 80% of NYC's IV drug users,
and 60% of its gay men. This is not good
news for gay men and IV drug users. But it
clearly suggests the possibility of con-
taining AIDS transmission, especially
among low-risk groups. Yet AIDS Phobia
fanned by a hysterical media, abounds in
low-risk groups.
The media's AIDS Coverage declares a
de facto gay quarantine, a lowering of a
homophobic society's threshold for repres-
sive tolerance. Indeed, high-risk AIDS
groups may soon ask sociologists to
develop a test for AIDS Phobia, a loboto-
mizing syndrome transmitted by passive
eye or ear contact with AIDS-news
headlines.
The U.S. military already tests the blood
it collects from its bases, presumably as a
drug screening measure. Marines testing
positive have already been quarantined.
Given the unavoidability of false -\>os\i\ve
AIDS testing, everyone should shudder at
the prospect of AIDS-related segregation
and detention. These things become think-
able in an AIDS-phobic culture.
While researchers hedge on 5-10 year
projections for AIDS vaccines, one thing
becomes apparent: the only way to stop
AIDS now is to prevent it. This means, for
starters, timely and accessible sex educa-
tion and clean needles for IV drug users.
The federal and most state, county and
local authorities have sadly reached the
reverse conclusion.
The federal department of Health and
Human Services cut its AIDS public
education budget from a measly $200,000
last year to a contemptibly small $120,000
this year. In Los Angeles, morally outraged
county politicians spiked a publicly-funded
AIDS prevention pamphlet because a
junkie could read in it how to sterilize an IV
needle. Only in America could this problem
occur. Canada, by contrast, makes sanitary
needles widely available. The "morally
objectionable" result is that the number of
Canadian IV drug users with AIDS is very
low.
Perhaps the most promising prevention
is occuring within San Francisco's gay
community, where the rate of rectal gonor-
rhea has dropped more than 75% in the
last year. This is another indication that
AIDS transmission, at least through anal
intercourse, also may be declining.
To the degree that it tails to sponsor
community-controlled AIDS prevention
education, the government chooses the
medieval strategy of reliance on fear, a
tactic found wanting during earlier cam-
paigns to control syphillis and gonorrhea.
Fear of AIDS— i.e., AIDS Phobia— is pre-
cisely what we should be loathing, if we
desire AIDS prevention. But AIDS Phobia
runs deep.
Just as AIDS compromises immunity to
disease, it suggest our vulnerability to any
number of catastrophes from nuclear war
to an eviction notice. What are our
defenses against these? AIDS reminds us
that our defenses are fragile. It is an
unpleasant reminder.
As one AIDS researcher concluded "At
some level people are associating sex with
death." Perhaps this strikes at the lonely
heart of AIDS Phobia. The thoroughfares
for AIDS transmission — sex and drugs —
run through those private joys in which we
seek refuge from life's dangers. Without
refuge from danger, fear is justified. AIDS
consciousness burdens new and even long-
standing romantic encounters with an un-
comfortable suspicion. And with awkward
exchanges of medical and sexual pre-
ference histories — exchanges that share all
the warmth and intimacy of a baggage
inspection by a customs officer.
Regardless of how nobly we struggle to
be pragmatic and educational about
preventing AIDS, the seeds of AIDS
Phobia are sown. It poses in each of us a
threat: the possibility that our insulation
from fear itself is deficient. Are calming
opinions and research about AIDS trans-
mission, like those expressed in articles
like this one, wrong? The government's
record on epidemics — and its disdain for
homosexuality and IV drug use— suggest
we should begin to worry if and when it
announces an AIDS vaccine. In the rush to
take it, will we remember the carcinogenic
polio (1960s) and Swine Flu (1970s)
vaccines?
12
PROCESSED WORLD #15
Slogans throughout the article taken from the
Manna-Pesto of the Revolutionary Garden
Party (Organarchist-Vangardener), illustra-
tions by The Big Mud Duck
ear Sirs,
What is wrong with Asparagus Spears that would
make them so soft and mushy after you put cheese
sauce on them to serve for guests?
— Complaint letter to Del Monte Corporation
It was the closest thing to an assembly line that I had
ever worked. The complaints were the raw material. The
final product was soothed feelings, assurances of quality
and care. It was the production of ideology, really. Trust in
the system, in the humanitarianism of big companies like
Del Monte.
The production process? The mail would come in big
bags early in the afternoon. Somebody would do the initial
sort: promotional correspondence (things like people
sending in 15 coupons for taco holders) off to the promo
half of the office, boxes in a bin, rest of the letters to us.
The boxes were gross. People would send back food,
yummy things like TV dinners put back in the carton and
mailed, worm-ridden prunes, cans of discolored Chinese
food (love those rotting beansprouts). The food might sit
in someone's house for a couple days then be sent through
the U.S. Postal System where it would be thrown about,
dropped, stamped, crushed. It would reach its destina-
tion, only to sit in an overheated office for a week or more.
We, the clerical workers, weren't required to open the
boxes. The supervisors were supposed to, which was fine
with us. The idea was probably that the supes were better
able to deal with the health hazard of decay. Now and then
one would go through the bin and try to stretch the
distinction between a box and a letter, giving us the small
boxes to be opened along with the letters. I let this slide
just once before I began immediately and obviously
dumping the boxes right back into the bin.
Not that the letters were much better. People felt
obliged to send us the sticks they almost choked on, the
'field debris' (worms, mouse carcasses, dirt clods) they
found in their cans, discolored, misshapen pear halves
wrapped in baggies and made even more discolored and
misshapen by automatic postal equipment.
The department responded to an astounding volume of
complaints. I was there in the slow season when we were
handling 250-300 a day. The letters would be opened, date
stamped, read, and then coded. In coding, we would write
down Del Monte's standard name for the product, the can
code, and a code for the complaint. The can codes were an
issue. The label asked that customers include the letters
and number found on the bottom of the can when writing
about problems. Encapsulated in that nine-unit alpha-
numeric code was the date and location of the packaging.
Needless to say, consumers were very interested in
cracking the code. People would want to know the age of
some cans they had just bought at a warehouse sale ui had
found at the back of Grandma's shelf. No help from Del
Monte.
The information from the coding would be entered into
a computer. The computer would (1) compile management
reports on all this information and (2) spit out a personable
letter, supposedly from the head of the department but in
PROCESSED WORLD #15
13
actuality signed by anybody, expressing
grave personal concern for the unfortu-
nate experience and assuring intensive
quality control Coupons good for the
pure hase of more Del Monte products
would be offered as compensation.
I hire was a bi/arre schema for deter-
mining how much compensation the
customer would receive. For a 50 cent
i in ofpeaches with a worm in it, the cus-
tomer would get a $1 coupon if she not-
iced the worm upon opening the can. If
she dumped the peaches into a pot and
saw the worm, she would get $2. If the
peaches reached the table, $4 If the
wormy peach was dished out onto a
plate, $6. If somebody bit Mr. Worm in
hall she would get the grand prize of $8
worth of coupons For choking, if done
by an adult, $3- if by a child, $5.
When customers wanted an expla-
nation, they usually got it — but the
explanations were disingenuous We
had form letters detailing the dangers of
old, rusty, bent cans. (Surprise! Don't
eat tood from cans that are leaking and
smell funny.) Another letter assured that
canned fruits and vegetables were just
as nutritious as fresh — after, of course,
chemicalized vitamins and minerals
were added back in to substitute for
those killed in the preserving process.
The supervisors were trained to identify
( hemi< al compounds or different spe< ies
ol insects that might be found in some-
one's package When the supes were
slumped, they sent it off to the lab who
could do chemical analyses or identify,
say, a found bolt as coming from the
drying machine for raisins. If a customer
was really hurt, the complaint went to
Legal so that they could fast-talk her into
signing releases in exchange for mini-
mal, but quick, reimbursement.
The response would be sent and the
complaint would be filed along with any
materials that accompanied it.
Squashed-up pears, rotting worms and
stale breakfast pastries would be stuck in
the tiling cabinet The office reeked —
and this was in the winter. I understand
that in summer the place stinks to high
heaven
After working in the office a while,
most of the workers found themselves
avoiding canned and frozen foods — es-
pecially the 'problem products' like
cream corn or canned salsa (I myselt
opened at least six letters relating how
palls were cast on New Years Eve parties
when someone fished up broken glass on
their tortilla chip ) Some workers frankly
said they were revolted by the stuff
Some asserted that fresh vegetables
were healthier others commented that
must ol the letters were from out of
state, in California, though, we have a
completely different wa> of eating (the
snooty way out) Whatever the reason,
we were all alienated from seeing the
problems of the corresponding con-
Su'inpfs a our problem Too. We knev»/
better than to buy the stuff in the first
place
Stale loke
I liked working in this uliiu
week At first, the letters were mleres
ting, tunny documents Instead ol being
grossed out, unable to eat, I found
myself obsessed with food Reading
about a tree/er burnt chicken pol pie
filled with artitic ially flavored cornstan h
would make me think ol the wondei s oi I
chicken pot pie clone right — a butter
crust tilled with chunks of slewed
chi< ken and bab\ carrots in a light cream
sauce Returned cartons ol Hawaiian
Punch that looked and smellecl like anti-
freeze made me thirsty for iresh truil
juices, for bittersweet carrot juice
cloudy organi< apple c ider, bottled Napa
Valle) wine grape juice Letter after
i^-M-er about shoddy canned vegetables
nngcte '"'.' hungry Tor Cri-Sp s,ree»i be<*OS
cooked in butter, garlic and Fresh
Oregano from m\ garden swiss chard
The Doll with the Soft Vinyl Head and the Naugahyde Heart!
Only
$1.36/hr.!
ibbage Patch Workers come with
ih ii own Green Card!
bellybulton and signature birthmark
with dimpled knees, blistered feet
and calluses.
Doll SolU Separately
Field tools not included
Turn YOUR Workplace into a
Warm, Cuddly Environment!
PROCESSED WORLD #15
with an olive oil and white vinegar
dressing and lots of freshly ground black
pepper, or artichokes served with home-
made mayonnaise...
But the amusement and heightened
sensuality soon wore off. I became de-
pressed. There were sad things, infuria-
ting things, going on in these letters.
What were the letters saying? To
paraphrase and simplify an idea deve-
loped by Claude Levi-Strauss — human-
kind as biological beings stand midway
between nature and culture. Food is our
primary link both to nature and to each
other Our system for obtaining and pre-
paring food indicates both our relation-
ship to nature and the structure of our
society.
Take this letter:
Dear Sir:
Last night my husband came in from
work late so I fixed him a "Del Monte
Tried Chicken Dinner. " He found a hair
in the broccoli. It has always made
him sick to find a hair in anything he
eats. So that was my wasted money,
time, and a dinner
He is on his lunch hour now. So I fixed
him a Salisbury Steak Dinner. I'd been
busy with my daughter and I really
didn't expect him home because of the
terrible weather. When he started to eat,
he found a very long hair in his steak
gravy. Well he was going to eat it, and
ate the steak, but found another hair in
the au gratin potatoes...
Since this has happened, I'm going to
buy Morton dinners, again.*
The classic working-class family. The
husband works at some low level job
where it's normal to go home for lunch.
He is the breadwinner, the king of the
castle. And out of utter gratitude for her
state of dependency, the wife is expected
to be his personal servant, preparing all
his tood on demand. Bad enough. But
what about TV dinners? The foodstuff is
of poor quality, the portions meager. An
analysis would reveal high salt content
(just the thing for that high blood
pressure) and destroyed nutrients from
the cooking-freezing-baking cycle (three,
three, three processes in one!). And let's
not forget the various unnecessary and
potentially carcinogenic chemicals used
to color, thicken, flavor, emulsify,
leaven, preserve.
Nobody likes to find hair in their food,
but why should it be so unexpected? To
be sure, all kinds of disgusting things
happen in food p rocessing plants. Field
* Morton is made by Del Monte In fact, the
Del Monle frozen foods are supposed to be
top of the line relative to Morton. So it won't
do this consumer any good to switch.
rats go into catsup. Workers drop rubber
gloves, hair nets and chewing gum into
vats. A friend of mine worked in a
Watsonville brussel sprouts factory
where a junkie friend of hers barfed on
the belt. My friend watched in smug
revulsion as the vomit-sauced cab-
bagettes were packaged and frozen.
(Aren't these stories oddly fascinating?)
The husband's horror of the hairs is
embedded in the modern food distribu-
tion system. Until recently, meals were
prepared in small kitchens by people
intimately associated in daily life. If you
found a hair in your food, it was Cousin
Bette's, or maybe the landlady's. A hair
in a TV dinner, on the other hand, is an
anonymous yet intimate intrusion. It
provokes a correspondingly vague-yet-
intense dread of contamination.
This separation from the source of
tood and its natural qualities can take on
absurd distances, as in the following
letter:
/ recently purchased your product Del
Monte "PITTED PRUNES." While
chewing one of the pitted prunes, much
to my horror, I bit down upon a pit — you
will find this pit attached plus the
purchase wrapper.
This pit incident has caused damage to
my tooth [which is capped]. I cannot
pi edict the extent of damage until I see
my dentist, however, when the pit made
contact with my tooth, I heard a loud
crack" and I now find the area to be
very sensitive.
As you can well imagine I am in great
distress and would appreciate hearing
from you as soon as possible.
I cannot afford dentistry as I am
unemployed.
The food companies can't even leave
untouched the most ostensibly 'natural'
foods. There are ways to eat prunes and
avoid the pits — you can hold the prune
and just bite around the pit, or gingerly
puncture the end of the prune and suck
the pit out, or stick the whole prune in
your mouth and chew around the sides of
the pit with your molars. If you expect to
find the pit anyway, you can deal with it.
I read many other letters where people
were similarly 'horrified,' 'shocked,' or
'appalled' to find a naturally-occuring
part in their food. And because they
really weren't expecting it, they often
hurt themselves when they choked on a
bean or grape stem, cut their cheek on a
chicken bone, or bit into a prune pit.
We need to know what to expect from
food so that we don't find ourselves
poisoned, down with case of the runs, or
unexpectedly drugged (what delicious
mushrooms!). But we also desire
variety, both for nutritional satisfaction
and sensual interest. The desire for
variety could be an evolutionary adapta-
tion, enabling humans to obtain the
nutrition they need in a range of environ-
ments. Tribal people, except in times of
extreme shortage, usually have a varied
diet obtained from small-scale agricul-
ture, hunting, and gathering. One tribe
in the Philippines can identify and use
1,600 different plants. Similarly, peasant
cultures, though usually burdened by
landlords, banks and profiteering mid-
Kitchen Motors Provide
Wholesome Family Entertainment!
PROCESSED WORLD #15
15
dlemen, diversify their diet by raising
vegetables appropriate to the season,
gathering herbs, greens, berries and
nuts in the wild, and hunting and
trapping. The people in outlying towns
and cities benefit from their resource-
fulness—witness a European or Chinese
town on market day.
The food corporations flatten diver-
sity. Choice and variety exist as an array
of commodities. What we find at super-
markets is not real variety; the same
things in different packaging take up
large amounts of 'shelf space.' A stan-
dard American 'junk food' item like
chocolate wafers with 'creme' centers is
offered in the name brand form (Oreos),
the competitive brand form CHydrox) and
the 'economy' house brand form (Lady
Lee, Bonnie Hubbard, Frau Sicheweg,
etc.). In the produce section, you can buy
the standard tomato, the standard
zucchini, the standard peach. But a
perusal of any seed or fruit tree catalog
is a revelation. Every 'basic' fruit or
vegetable exists in several forms, each
varying in taste, texture and appear-
ance. Unless you have your own garden,
it's impossible to obtain the variety our
agricultural heritage has to offer.
The Del Monte letters revealed a great
deal of atomized, isolated food consump-
tion. Particulary sad were the old people
who would write about how they lived on
TV dinners. Since they ate by them-
selves, they found the portions just
right, with no waste or leftovers, and the
dinners were easy to prepare. But TV
dinners are not a healthy diet, especially
for older people needing to restrict their
consumption of salt, fat, and refined
carbohydrates. These atomized meal
preparations reveal the sort of com-
munity that people in our society age
into— none.
True, at least a third of the letters
claimed a "guest" or "company" was
present when food was found to be
defective. Like the asparagus letter at
the beginning of this article. Or this one:
Freeze The Zukes'
Del Monte
Consumer Affairs:
Katherine M. Randle:
Dear Ms. Randle:
My husband and I have just returned
from a vacation and upon my return I
found your letter of Jan. 10th, 1985
awaiting me.
I was sick to my stomach for 3 days on
my vacation, due solely to the memory of
my opening of the Del Monte can of
Yellowstone or Freestone Yellow Peaches,
taking a quick sip of the usually delicious
syrup, and seeing this horrible cock-roach,
floating up to me right under my eyes. The
mere thought of it still sickens me. I very
easily could have swallowed some remote
part of the roach or even its feces. I tasted
the syrup. I did not eat any part of the
peaches.
Your letter explains in detail the pro-
cedure you take, and I quote, "You take
particular care that the product is
wholesome and free of any foreign
matter" unquote. How then can you
explain the presence of this ugly horribly
roach floating in the juice, floating up to
me before my eyes?
I have the roach itself frozen in a
Baggie, the can with the number stamped
intact on the bottom of the can in my
freezer, as per instructions from the
gentleman with whom I spoke at the State
Food and Drug Administration. I would
very much like to get the filthy thing out of
my freezer.
I was ill for 3 days after the incident,
wholly due to the fact of remembering the
roach. My stomach was truly upset. Nice
way to start a vacation! On the 5th day we
took a tour in Honolulu to the Dole
pineapple fields and saw the sign of the
Del Monte fields, and the mere sign "Del
Monte" conjured up my memory again of
the roach. I will never again be able to
enjoy the delicious taste of a cold, juicy
freestone peach from any can, from any
brand again. This thought alone makes me
very very angry. So, Ms. Randle, I'm
sorry to inform you that 3-$1 .00 coupons is
not going to compensate me for the misery
I encountered on my vacation and the
future sacrifice of any enjoyment I would
derive from eatmg a dish of nice canned
peaches.
I'm returning your 3-$1.00 coupons and
hopefully some remuneration in accord
with the misery I endured will be forth-
coming. If not I shall take the horrible
cock-roach frozen and the can and consult
my attorney.
I thoroughly dislike writing a letter like
this Ms. Randle, I know you are just doing
your job, but I have no alternative.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Dor Man
La Mesa, Calif.
...Last evening I had guests for
dinner. I was serving the fruit cocktail as
g "";» m an appetizer when one of my guests
J vS found this bit of extra on his spoon [a
4 y f >/ grape stem]. Needless to say, I was very
embarrassed. ..
But having guests was such a common
claim that I suspect it often wasn't true.
People didn't feel confident in asserting
complaints on their own behalf. They
needed a witness, imaginary or other-
wise. Somehow, they were embarrassed
about eating alone.
Meal sharing is a way of experiencing
human connectedness — care, equality
friendship. From this point of view, the
nuclear family dependent on corporate
merchandise is clearly a failure. Inside
it, people are bored, tense, harrassed —
like the harried housewife with her Steak
Dinner. Outside, they are alone. The
most fundamental human collective
activity, meal preparation and consump-
tion, is done in solitude, even after the
preparation becomes strenuous and the
consumption delicate, as it is for the
elderly. In many suburban families, it is
common for people regularly to eat their
dinners while watching separate TV's,
unless they go out together to eat.
The Price of Grain and the Price of Blood
The Third World is starving. Some
would claim that it is wrong to be con-
cerned with alienation and sensual
deprivation in the U.S. when many
people can't even get a minimal daily
serving of rice and beans. Such an
attitude fails to see the interrelatedness
of the problems, how the same institu-
tions are responsible for both. It also
misses the possibility for a politics
rooted in our daily life, leaving us power-
less to do anything except donate money
to this or that relief agency.
In Food First by Francis Moore Lappe
and Joseph Collins, you can look up Del
Monte in the index, and then go down
"Cash Crops Will
Solve World Hunger"
16
PROCESSED WORLD #15
with an olive oil and white vinegar
dressing and lots of freshly ground black
pepper, or artichokes served with home-
made mayonnaise...
But the amusement and heightened
sensuality soon wore off. I became de-
pressed. There were sad things, infuria-
ting things, going on in these letters.
What were the letters saying? To
paraphrase and simplify an idea deve-
loped by Claude Levi-Strauss — human-
kind as biological beings stand midway
between nature and culture. Food is our
primary link both to nature and to each
other. Our system for obtaining and pre-
paring food indicates both our relation-
ship to nature and the structure of our
society
Take this letter:
Dear Sir:
Last night my husband came in from
work late so I fixed him a "Del Monte
I ried Chicken Dinner. " He found a hair
in the broccoli. It has always made
him sick to find a hair in anything he
eats. So that was my wasted money,
tune, and a dinner.
He is on his lunch hour now. So I fixed
him a Salisbury Steak Dinner. I'd been
busy with my daughter and I really
didn't expect him home because of the
terrible weather. When he started to eat,
he found a very long hair in his steak
gravy. Well he was going to eat it, and
ate the steak, but found another hair in
the au gratin potatoes...
Since this has happened, I'm going to
buy Morton dinners, again. *
The classic working-class family. The
husband works at some low level job
where it's normal to go home for lunch.
He is the breadwinner, the king of the
castle. And out of utter gratitude for her
state of dependency, the wife is expected
to be his personal servant, preparing all
his food on demand. Bad enough. But
what about TV dinners? The foodstuff is
of poor quality, the portions meager. An
analysis would reveal high salt content
(just the thing for that high blood
pressure) and destroyed nutrients from
the cooking-freezing-baking cycle (three,
three, three processes in one!). And let's
not forget the various unnecessary and
potentially carcinogenic chemicals used
to color, thicken, flavor, emulsify,
leaven, preserve.
Nobody likes to find hair in their food,
but why should it be so unexpected? To
be sure, all kinds of disgusting things
happen in foo d processing plants. Field
* Morton is made by Del Monte In fact, the
Del Monte frozen foods are supposed to be
top of the line relative to Morton. So it won't
do this consumer any good to switch
rats go into catsup. Workers drop rubber
gloves, hair nets and chewing gum into
vats. A friend of mine worked in a
Watsonville brussel sprouts factory
where a junkie friend of hers barfed on
the belt. My friend watched in smug
revulsion as the vomit-sauced cab-
bagettes were packaged and frozen.
(Aren't these stories oddly fascinating?)
The husband's horror of the hairs is
embedded in the modern food distribu-
tion system. Until recently, meals were
prepared in small kitchens by people
intimately associated in daily life. If you
found a hair in your food, it was Cousin
Bette's, or maybe the landlady's. A hair
in a TV dinner, on the other hand, is an
anonymous yet intimate intrusion. It
provokes a correspondingly vague-yet-
intense dread of contamination
This separation from the source of
food and its natural qualities can take on
absurd distances, as in the following
letter:
/ recently purchased your product Del
Monte "PITTED PRUNES." While
chewing one of the pitted prunes, much
to my horror, I bit down upon a pit — you
will find this pit attached plus the
purchase wrapper.
This pit incident has caused damage to
my tooth [which is capped]. I cannot
pi edict the extent of damage until I see
my dentist, however, when the pit made
contact with my tooth, I heard a loud
crack" and I now find the area to be
very sensitive.
As you can well imagine I am in great
distress and would appreciate hearing
from you as soon as possible.
I cannot afford dentistry as I am
unemployed.
The food companies can't even leave
untouched the most ostensibly 'natural'
foods. There are ways to eat prunes and
avoid the pits — you can hold the prune
and just bite around the pit, or gingerly
puncture the end of the prune and suck
the pit out, or stick the whole prune in
your mouth and chew around the sides of
the pit with your molars. If you expect to
find the pit anyway, you can deal with it.
I read many other letters where people
were similarly 'horrified,' 'shocked,' or
'appalled' to find a naturally-occuring
part in their food. And because they
really weren't expecting it, they often
hurt themselves when they choked on a
bean or grape stem, cut their cheek on a
chicken bone, or bit into a prune pit.
We need to know what to expect from
food so that we don't find ourselves
poisoned, down with case of the runs, or
unexpectedly drugged (what delicious
mushrooms!). But we also desire
variety, both for nutritional satisfaction
and sensual interest. The desire for
variety could be an evolutionary adapta-
tion, enabling humans to obtain the
nutrition they need in a range of environ-
ments. Tribal people, except in times of
extreme shortage, usually have a varied
diet obtained from small-scale agricul-
ture, hunting, and gathering. One tribe
in the Philippines can identify and use
1,600 different plants. Similarly, peasant
cultures, though usually burdened by
landlords, banks and profiteering mid-
Kitchen Motors Provide
Wholesome Family Entertainment!
PROCESSED WORLD #15
15
dlemen, diversify their diet by raising
vegetables appropriate to the season,
gathering herbs, greens, berries and
nuts in the wild, and hunting and
trapping. The people in outlying towns
and cities benefit from their resource-
fulness—witness a European or Chinese
town on market day.
The food corporations flatten diver-
sity. Choice and variety exist as an array
of commodities. What we find at super-
markets is not real variety; the same
things in different packaging take up
large amounts of 'shelf space.' A stan-
dard American 'junk food' item like
chocolate wafers with 'creme' centers is
offered in the name brand form (Oreos),
the competitive brand form fHydrox) and
the 'economy' house brand form (Lady
Lee, Bonnie Hubbard, Frau Sicheweg,
etc ) In the produce section, you can buy
the standard tomato, the standard
zucchini, the standard peach. But a
perusal of any seed or fruit tree catalog
is a revelation. Every 'basic' fruit or
vegetable exists in several forms, each
varying in taste, texture and appear-
ance. Unless you have your own garden,
it's impossible to obtain the variety our
agricultural heritage has to offer.
The Del Monte letters revealed a great
deal of atomized, isolated food consump-
tion. Particulary sad were the old people
who would write about how they lived on
TV dinners. Since they ate by them-
selves, they found the portions just
right, with no waste or leftovers, and the
dinners were easy to prepare. But TV
dinners are not a healthy diet, especially
for older people needing to restrict their
consumption of salt, fat, and refined
carbohydrates. These atomized meal
preparations reveal the sort of com-
munity that people in our society age
into— none.
True, at least a third of the letters
claimed a "guest" or "company" was
present when food was found to be
defective. Like the asparagus letter at
the beginning of this article. Or this one:
"Freeze The Zukes"
Del Monte
Consumer Affairs:
Katherine M. Randle:
Dear Ms. Randle:
My husband and I have just returned
from a vacation and upon my return I
found your letter of Jan. 10th, 1985
awaiting me.
I was sick to my stomach for 3 days on
my vacation, due solely to the memory of
my opening of the Del Monte can of
Yellowstone or Freestone Yellow Peaches,
taking a quick sip of the usually delicious
syrup, and seeing this horrible cock-roach,
floating up to me right under my eyes. The
mere thought of it still sickens me. I very
easily could have swallowed some remote
part of the roach or even its feces. I tasted
the syrup. I did not eat any part of the
peaches.
Your letter explains in detail the pro-
cedure you take, and I quote, "You take
particular care that the product is
wholesome and free of any foreign
matter" unquote. How then can you
explain the presence of this ugly horribly
roach floating in the juice, floating up to
me before my eyes?
I have the roach itself frozen in a
Baggie, the can with the number stamped
intact on the bottom of the can in my
freezer, as per instructions from the
gentleman with whom I spoke at the State
Food and Drug Administration. I would
very much like to get the filthy thing out of
my freezer.
I was ill for 3 days after the incident,
wholly due to the fact of remembering the
roach. My stomach was truly upset. Nice
way to start a vacation! On the 5th day we
took a tour in Honolulu to the Dole
pineapple fields and saw the sign of the
Del Monte fields, and the mere sign "Del
Monte" conjured up my memory again of
the roach. I will never again be able to
enjoy the delicious taste of a cold, juicy
freestone peach from any can, from any
brand again. This thought alone makes me
very very angry. So, Ms. Randle, I'm
sorry to inform you that 3-$1 .00 coupons is
not going to compensate me for the misery
I encountered on my vacation and the
future sacrifice of any enjoyment I would
derive from eatmg a dish of nice canned
peaches.
I'm returning your 3-51.00 coupons and
hopefully some remuneration in accord
with the misery I endured will be forth-
coming. If not I shall take the horrible
cock-roach frozen and the can and consult
my attorney.
I thoroughly dislike writing a letter like
this Ms. Randle, I know you are just doing
your job, but I have no alternative.
Siqcerely,
Mrs. Dor Man
La Mesa, Calif.
...Last evening I had guests for
dinner. I was serving the fruit cocktail as
t an appetizer when one of my guests
found this bit of extra on his spoon [a
grape stem]. Needless to say, I was very
embarrassed...
But having guests was such a common
claim that I suspect it often wasn't true.
People didn't feel confident in asserting
complaints on their own behalf. They
needed a witness, imaginary or other-
wise. Somehow, they were embarrassed
about eating alone.
Meal sharing is a way of experiencing
human connectedness — care, equality
friendship. From this point of view, the
nuclear family dependent on corporate
merchandise is clearly a failure. Inside
it, people are bored, tense, harrassed —
like the harried housewife with her Steak
Dinner. Outside, they are alone. The
most fundamental human collective
activity, meal preparation and consump-
tion, is done in solitude, even after the
preparation becomes strenuous and the
consumption delicate, as it is for the
elderly. In many suburban families, it is
common for people regularly to eat their
dinners while watching separate TV's,
unless they go out together to eat.
The Price of Grain and the Price of Blood
The Third World is starving. Some
would claim that it is wrong to be con-
cerned with alienation and sensual
deprivation in the U.S. when many
people can't even get a minimal daily
serving of rice and beans. Such an
attitude fails to see the interrelatedness
of the problems, how the same institu-
tions are responsible for both. It also
misses the possibility for a politics
rooted in our daily life, leaving us power-
less to do anything except donate money
to this or that relief agency.
In Food First by Francis Moore Lappe
and Joseph Collins, you can look up Del
Monte in the index, and then go down
"Cash Crops Will
Solve World Hunger'
16
PROCESSED WORLD #15
the sublistings to find out how the
company usurps traditional farm prac-
tices in different areas.
• In Costa Rica, the company gives
special loans to politically well-placed
landowners.
• In Guatemala, Del Monte owns
57,000 acres of agricultural land but
plants only 9000. The rest is fenced off
lust to keep the peasants from using it.
• In Mexico, the company pays the
farmers 10 cents a pound for asparagus
that it gels 25 cents a pound for in the
U.S.
"Give Peas A Chance"
• In the Philippines, armed company
agents coerce peasants into leasing their
land to Del Monte's pineapple plan-
tations. Cattle have been driven onto
planted fields to destroy crops, the
peasants and their animals are bom-
barded with aerial sprays.
See also sublistings for Kenya,
Hawaii, and Crystal City, Texas.
An anonymous source in Del Monte
middle management relates a bit of
company lore. In the early seventies, a
new data entry clerk punched in the
wrong destination code for a 480-boxcar
shipment of lima beans grown in the
Philippines. Instead of arriving in Japan
for processing, the limas wound up,
completely rotten, in Kenya. The
company fired the clerk and cavalierly
wrote off the loss as a food donation to
starving Africa. Such charity.
A principal mechanism used for the
destruction of native food systems is the
conversion to export-oriented cash eco-
nomies. The best lands are stolen/
bought by the corporations — or, more
usually, by their agents in the local
upper class Companies like Del Monte
serve as the notorious "middleman,"
taking over the secondary role of broker,
shipper, packer, merchandiser. The dis-
placed peasantry surge onto marginal
land which is quickly exhausted, farmed
to death. Those remaining work for
wages on the coffee, cocoa, rubber,
luxury vegetable plantations. They buy
their food from stores, much of it now
imported and alien to the native cuisine.
Here in the U.S., the best lands are
obliterated by housing tracts, shopping
malls, industrial plants. I grew up in the
Marysville-Yuba City area of California.
Dividing the two towns is the Feather
River. Like the Nile, the Feather River
used to flood once a year, depositing a
layer of fertile silt. This silt built up into
a topsoil suitable for wonderfully produc-
tive orchards. The area used to be
forested with peach, walnut, almond,
plum trees. Until the construction of
expensive, ecologically destructive
dams, the towns used to worry about
rainy season flooding. As I was growing
up, more and more of the orchards were
covered over by housing tracts. Im-
mediately outside of town began the
foothills of the Sierra Nevada, a region
not as suitable for intensive farming but
more pleasant for living (above the fog,
below the snow, and with a view). And
the foothills didn't flood. It seemed
obvious that people should live in the
hills and leave the valley floor either in
its natural state or as farmland. As an
adolescent, I would spend afternoons
mapping such ideal communities,
sketching in community greenhouses
and herb gardens as well as libraries,
theaters, and hospitals.
r ez^u
"Squash The State"
I still fantasize urgently about such
communities. I imagine little burgs with
lookout points onto the valley, parts of
which are laid out for agriculture, parts
of which have been reclaimed by nature.
The housing tracts and shopping malls
have been torn down — the material from
the old buildings has rotted away, been
recycled, or been shipped off to the
anthropological section of the Museum
of Natural History in San Francisco. The
orchards have been replanted — but
instead of miles of boring Elbertas and
Freestone peaches for the canning
industry, we grow many varieties of
fruit. This not only enlivens our diet and
prolongs the seasons in which different
fruits are available, it ensures that entire
stands aren't threatened by blights or
bad weather affecting either certain
genetic strains or particular times of
ripening or blossoming. The diversity
also satisfies the cultural preferences of
the different peoples who have settled in
the area.
There are fields of grain, again of
diverse varieties and genetic strains. We
never export grain, though. Most areas
of the world are regionally self-sufficient
in staple agriculture, and have well-
maintained warehouses to protect them-
selves from food shortage. We do ship
off a few regional delicacies, like spiced
canned peaches — we had to do some-
thing with those old canneries! — nut
butters, a Chinese-influenced plum
sauce, virgin olive oil, wine. But our
exports are nothing we can hold anyone
to ransom with.
Individuals or small collectives have
trusteeship for plots of land that they
work themselves. I and a couple of
friends oversee an olive orchard planted
on the lower slope of the hills, a prune
orchard a little below that, an orchard of
mixed fruits — fancy peaches, kiwis, per-
simmons, other things we raise for the
local market. Next to the orchards is an
open cropped field that sometimes grows
wheat, sometimes safflower, sometimes
clover for grazing goats. The work
required by our land trust varies from
season to season, year to year. Things
are especially hectic in late summer and
fall when the olives need to be picked
and pressed, the prunes dried and
stored. We divide chores as best we can,
but people have different capacities and
other pulls on their time. Inequities
happen, quarrels do flare up as a result
and need to be mediated. Other col-
"Cultivate a Sense of
Humor— Hoe, Hoe, Hoe!"
PROCESSED WORLO #15
17
lectives have been known to fragment in
huffs of personal resentment.
We use a mixed-bag technology. Even
if we wanted to use petroleum-based
chemicals and fertilizers, we couldn't.
They're just not available; oil is too
scarce. We learned a lot from the
farmers on a work-learn excursion we
made to Italy, which has a climate
similar to ours and grows similar crops.
A lot of the stuff that comes out of the
transformed U.C. Davis is useful, too.
Davis, previously a research center for
agribusiness, is now a bustling study
center for the decentralized western
North America food production systems.
But many improvement come out of our
own experimentation. We own the tools
and machinery that we use day-to-day.
The special stuff we either borrow from
the county warehouse or have brought in
by special jobber teams that share in the
harvest.
At home, I have a vegetable garden
Why Do
Foodservice
Operators
Prefer
Home Cooking?
'Cuz they know
what really goes
into "foodservice
operating"!!
shared with the woman next door and
her daughter. Now and then I coerce my
lover to go out and pick some squash or
rake the paths, but he mostly likes to
stay inside and read. Jeff is a teacher;
for him, dirt-poking ranges from tedious
to uninteresting.
How do we prepare our food? Some-
times we cook at home, sometimes we
warm up leftovers, sometimes we eat at
the neighborhood kitchen. The cooking
at the neighborhood kitchen is usually
good, and the kitchen is a great place to
catch up on local gossip and caucus for
county meetings. Now and then, to
celebrate, we eat at a specialized
restaurant, where the real cooks oper-
ate...
Crusts of Brie and Such
Such Utopian thinking is not irrelevant
pending some grand historical juncture.
Instead, we should use such thinking
no"w, both To critiqTre the present world,
and to imagine and build the world that
we want to create.
A sane food system, both for the Third
World and for us, would mean com-
munity responsibility for, and control of,
local food production resources. To leave
them in the hands of the corporations is
to be vulnerable to their repressive and
irresponsible economic, political, and
ecological practices.
Parts of such a sane food system
already exist. In San Francisco, there are
a couple of fairly good cooperatively-
run grocery stores, a farmers' market
where small growers can sell their
produce, and a community garden net-
work. There used to be a widely-patron-
ized home delivery cooperative. These
institutions should be emulated and
broadened. But along with such worthy
do-it-yourself projects, we should exa-
mine the land use in our vicinities. Our
cities are built on valleys and plains that
were once farmland — land that should
still be the ground of our sustenance.
Possible activities to retake this ground
range from organizing community gar-
dens* on vacant land to fighting
construction projects that eat into agri-
cultural districts, demanding a redistri-
bution of that land to small growers who
use ecologically responsible methods.
When I announced at the Processed
World shop that I was working an article
about food, someone jibed, "I don't
know if I want to read it. It will tell me
* Especially in an urban area, it's a good idea
to get the soil tested for lead and other
chemical residues before you start a garden
Make the landlord pay for it!
"Weed Out the
Pesticide Pushers'
18
PROCESSED WORLD #15
,1,1,1,1,1,1,1
■ :rr,:ri..:i:i:i!i!i:i:i!i!m:
rtrTTTTTT, i , i ; i ;
about all the things I shouldn't eat but do
anyway." We expect an analysis of the
food industry to conclude by listing
things that are unhealthy (like chemical
and fat laded processed food), or deprive
other people of needed resources (like
the meat industry or the production of
cocoa and coffee), or should be boycotted
(like Campbell's soup, Nestles, table
grapes...). Such calls for abstention not
only sounds like yet another puritanical
injunction against enjoyment, but can
also be impossibly inconvenient. Our
food distribution system has been
colonized by the food corporations, too.
For instance, you're late for work and
you don't have time to pack a reasonably
nutritious lunch. You're going to have to
forage at the company lunchroom or the
corner roach coach What kind of food do
you really expect to find there?
People have a fierce emotional attach-
ment to what they eat. Food is pleasure,
security, cultural affirmation. A politics
of food needs to account for all these
things. Pleasure particularly is dis-
counted in discussing food. Take pains
with a pie for a party and you're im-
mediately accused of being a yuppie.
Propose that a group meet at a local ca/e
and somebody will assert that McDon-
. i l I I I I I I I 1,1,1
■ ■ lllujjjjjj i ! i ; i ; i
aids is more working-class. Yet a recla-
mation of regional cuisine can be a
motivation for a Third World people to
reject the banal diet it has been forced to
adopt since the destruction of its native
agriculture. A similar urge on our part
can be an enticement to the development
ol food distribution systems that super-
sede the corporate food industry because
they offer food that is more pleasurable
as well as produced in socially and
ecologically responsible ways.
We also find pleasure in the com-
munality of food — sitting down and
gossiping while peeling apples, hoeing a
garden together, sharing a feast. Such
activities may seem too homely for
political consideration. But think about
what it means to have these activities
supplanted from our daily life in favor of
the more quickly prepared, the more
brilliantly packaged. There are many
ways to be starved. Food is our primary
connection to the world around us and to
each other. Leaving it to the corporations
is self-destructive in more ways than
one. Establishing an intimate relation-
ship to food is a way of reviving our own
diminishing humanity.
— by Paxa Lourde
i . . . i , • . . , . . i , i , i , . - 1 , . - . . i , i , i , i , i , i , i , • - 1 , i . i , •
I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I
!i|iji|i i i i i i i i i i
i i i i i
1,11
iiiii
i i i i i
'■'i i i i
i i i i i i i r
i i i i i i i i i i i i i i
i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i
i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i
i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i i
i,i,i|i|i i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i'i
PROCESSED WORLD #15
19
CHAINSAWS
&
CRT'S
DO NOT A
FOREST MAKE
Book review of Ecodefense—A Field Guide to Monkey-
wrenching, (A Ned Ludd Book, from Earth First! Books, P.O.
Box 5871, Tucson, AZ 85703). Reviewed by Primitivo
Morales.
omewhere in California, in an air-conditioned and
sealed chamber, a CDC 60meg hard disk spins in a
vacuum. The system operator notes the log-on of a
job lyrically named "RD_CONTOUR_39". Si-
lently the currents ebb and flow; in another room a printer
continues chattering to itself as it vomits out a few more
meters of paper (recycled!). Smocked figures take the
stacks, feed them to other machines, sort them into
various bins. Messengers appear and the envelopes and
boxes disappear to a Crown-Zellerbach building, all glass
and metal. Polite people huddle over the paper, more
machines are invoked, arcane symbols are inscribed; more
paper is processed.
i$tL..vfc! ■„,.>.,.. .^IWvAiA.
Backcountry Spiking Can Be Fun For The Whole Family!
20
In the early morning hours a week later, in the Siskiyou
mountains, a couple of engineers in battered yellow
hardhats climb out of a pickup truck, consulting
blue-prints as they finish their coffee. With a team of
surveyors they begin driving a confusing array of pine
stakes with gaily colored ribbons into the ground. Before
summer heat peaks, there is a narrow paved road snaking
through the pristine valley, up ridges and into a primeval
forest. Below the snarl of chainsaws and the clanking of
Cats you can hear the low growling of logging trucks. The
overall plan says that after the logging phase, one area is
to be reforested as a tree farm, and the remaining land
will become a subdivision of summer houses.
Even as you read this, more forest is vanishing beneath
the saws and the Rome Plows. Wetlands are filled,
prairies are fenced and grazed to death, more marginal
areas are utilized. Whether in the Brazilian forest or the
Jersey shore the old natural world vanishes.
There is a wide variety of evils that are the results of
this: land erosion and silting, sinking water tables, ground
& water contamination, less green and more noise,
perhaps major catastrophe in the form of new weather
cycles or reduced oxygen generation. For any of us who
find joy in the natural world, it is becoming a grimmer and
grayer place.
But wait! Two dark forms slip through the trees under a
full moon. They move quickly up the ridge, pulling stakes
as they go. Occasionally one will move off the road, reach
up a tree, remove a ribbon. In the past few weeks other
teams of people have been roaming the intended logging
area, driving spikes into trees, mostly above head height.
Several old mining roads into the area have had spikes
driven into the roadbed, and in one place a culvert has
been pulled out. Although the down-slope will erode, the
road (and its users) would cause yet more damage.
As with many corporate greedheads' ventures, the
project is on marginal financial ground. The increased
costs of relaying survey lines and rescheduling crews, the
greater security forces needed, have hurt. Today a letter
came from the ranger's office saying that there has been
an anonymous message that the trees in the lumber sale
have been spiked. A few spikes have been found, and
there are surely more. The chainsaws of the loggers won't
find the spikes, but expensive blades in the sawmill will.
(No, Virginia, it doesn't really hurt the tree.) The project
is eventually cancelled. Maybe they'll be back; for now a
PROCESSED WORLD #15
small defensive engagement has been
won.
Although the exact details herein are
fictitious, they outline a real phenome-
non: Monkeywrenching. A 1973 book by
Edwary Abbey, The Monkeywrench
Gang (Bantam) gave a fictitious, stirring
account of one such band of 'ecoteurs.'
Now there is a new book, Ecodefense — A
Field Guide to Monkeywrenching which
updates some aspects of this nefarious
activity. Editor Dave Foreman, who has
worked with The Wilderness Society in
the southwest and Washington DC, is a
founder of a militant environmental
group called "Earth First!". Although
I'm sure he would never violate the law
himself, he clearly has talked to people
who have. Most of the book is a well-
written distillation of their skills and
hard-earned experience. As a practiced
billboard corrector I enjoyed his com-
ments on the topic and found them well
taken. From my juvenile activities in
New Mexico I could appreciate his
advice on the sabotage of bulldozers,
land developers, and the like. Accurate,
and fun reading, even if you never plan
on doing it.
Chapters include tactics against roads
and tires, vehicles and heavy construc-
tion equipment, defense of animals,
propaganda and "miscellaneous devil-
try." There is an excellent chapter on
security which should be read by all who
engage in activities at which they would
rather not be caught. He covers clothing,
tools, communications, night operations,
guards (two and four footed), and basic
evidence (traces you leave behind, or
that cling to you).
Perhaps the most interesting part of
the book is the first chapter, Strategic
Monkeywrenching. After a review of
what this country used to have and has
lost, he notes what else is threatened (a
lot). He points out that much wilderness
development is on a precarious financial
footing, if it can be made expensive
enough a lot of projects will be called off.
He then outlines 11 principles in the
light against the despoilers.
Monkeywrenching is
1) Nonviolent— It is directed at mach-
ines and tools, and care is taken that
people won't be hurt.
2) Not Organized— There is no central
direction. The lack of a network prevents
infiltration.
3) Individual — It is carried out by
individuals or by small groups that know
each other well.
4) Targeted — It is not random van-
dalism: strike the most vulnerable point.
5) Timely— Generally not to be done
when/where there is civil disobedience
occuring — it will cloud the issue and
bring heat on allies who didn't do it.
6) Dispersed— It is widespread in the
US (and elsewhere).
7) Diverse — All kinds of people are
involved, and they will probably each
have their own specialties, local or
distant.
8) Fun — It is serious, even dangerous,
but there is also excitement, camarade-
rie, etc.
9) Not Revolutionary — "It does not
aim to overthrow any social, political or
economic system. It is merely non-
violent self-defense or the wild. It is
aimed at keeping industrial 'civilization'
out of natural areas and causing its
retreat from areas that should be wild. It
is not major industrial sabotage. Explo-
sives, firearms & other dangerous tools
are usually avoided. They invite greater
sc rutiny Irom law enforcement agencies,
repression and loss of public support.
I I he Direct Action group in Canada is a
good example of what monkeywrenching
is not ) Even Republicans monkey-
wrench "
10) Simple— Simplest tool, safest tac-
tic th.it will do the job.
11) Deliberate and Ethical— Those
who engage in it must be very conscious
of the gravity of their actions. This is a
moral action — protecting life, defending
the earth.
In general these are excellent points.
He has a good sense of the morality of
the activity, and the book continually
emphasizes thoughtfulness in acting.
Small, decentralized groups doing what
they will is not only safer, but also more
effective. People naturally choose tar-
gets of interest — perhaps not every
malefactor will be impeded, but certainly
a lot will. If one groups breaks up or is
caught, there are still others out there.
Unfortunately with the large number of
targets, we must pick and choose. Occa-
sionally 'targets of opportunity' should
be seized, but if such actions are to have
any hope of succeeding they must be
This Land Is Your Land
PROCESSED WORLD #15
calculated. The point tnat action is to be
fun is worth remembering, for so much
of what we do isn't. There's no reason
why action has to be a drag. Of course, if
you don't enjoy such things you
shouldn't engage in them.
Not everybody that engages in these
actions qualifies as a monkeywrencher.
You might trash heavy equipment only
because it's there — get off on breaking
glass and burning equipment — then ride
off into the sunset, ruining the hills with
your motorcycles, throwing away your
beer bottles as you go.
My biggest problem with Foreman's
analysis is point #9. As long as all we do
is limit ourselves to defensive reactions
to attacks, we will find ourselves
defeated. Here and there we may chase
the zopilotes (buzzards) away, but they
go pick on some other area that is less
defended, or turn their bloody attentions
overseas. No, as long as there is this
drive to subjugate nature, to value the
land, water and air only as things to be
bought/sold/used, the "developers"
and the rapists will be back. If $100,000
was more than they could afford this
time, in two years maybe the accoun-
tants will say that such a sum is OK. For
a small company such costs may make
them stop, but for any of the major
companies (Weyerhauser, etc.) an extra
half-million in costs (which would be a
major attack) will be written off. They
pay higher insurance rates and continue
— they may make only $3.5 million, but
they can stand the smaller profit. And of
course in a serious confrontation with the
government, they can escalate farther
and faster than we can if they think it is
worth the financial and political price.
I myself have a strictly tactical en-
dorsement of non-violence; as a strategy
it is foolish. In addition to the clear need
(at times) for self-defense, there are
times that those who are most respon-
sible for public crimes should be person-
ally subject to retaliation. The big vul-
ture should come to roost on their
shoulder — not the guard's, or the
secretary's, or the slob's out in the field.
Such actions are never to be engaged in
lightly; when it is done there must be a
broad understanding of why: it must
answer a common sense of justice.
The book doesn't touch on monkey-
wrenching outside of immediately
threatened wilderness areas. But there's
no reason for those in the urban jungle to
feel slighted, or to travel great distances
to do something. If you find yourself one
day handling some information about
something that sounds like a bad idea,
you might check it out. If it really is bad,
maybe you could create a timely inter-
vention. At the very least you might be
able to publicize some singularly sleazy
aspect, and warn those near the affected
area who may not yet know of future
plans.
For Those
Hard-to-
Reach
Spots
Whether in the Pacific Northwest,
New Zealand, or the raped Lake Baikal
in the USSR, this fight is international
and very political. Acid rain doesn't stop
at the Canadian border. "Free" and
"communist" countries alike have a
terrible record on conservation and
reducing pollution; third-world countries
face the threat of deforestation (no more
cooking fires) both from domestic use,
the US cattle barons, and transnational
agribusiness.
fo change the thinking that leads to
the attack on the earth and to derail the
system that does it, is very definitely
revolutionary. It will require that all of us
change the way we live; this country
consumes over half of the world's non-
renewable resources. Nobody else even
comes close — how long do you think it
will last, gringo? Radical change will
strike at the very root of our economy
(intensive and extensive exploitation), at
the politics and psychology of consump-
tion, and our relation to the natural
world and with each other.
This book will not tell you why the
Earth should be defended (if you can't
feel it I'm not sure any book could ever
explain it), but it will give some ideas on
how to defend it. It's good on the
mechanical details and is thoughtul in its
purpose. The book is worth reading for
anybody who is inclined to such resis-
tance, for the curious, for law enforce-
ment officials and developers, and for
office/industrial workers who take an
interest in the earth. If you wish that the
world looked like the Pasadena Freeway,
you won't like this book. But you might
go off and play on your freeway, and
leave a bit of green for those animals
among us who don't. Wishful thinking.
Ecodefense is available for $10, as if
Earth First! The Radical Environmental
Journal (8 issues a year, $15), some very
nice calendars and some 'silent, agita-
tors' (stick-on labels, one of which
condemns Coors), from Earth First! at
the address at the beginning of this
review. They solicit suggestions on
monkeywrenching (tested only, please)
and clippings. Don't send your name on
such items — send them separately from
any commercial correspondence. They
don't keep a list of buyers of the book
and do not keep letters. Ecodefense will
be published as an on-going project with
periodic updates. Look in your local
bookstore.
4 stars — check it out!
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
babysitting & laundry,
shopping — her day
off.
Kurt Lipschutz
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
22
PROCESSED WORLD #15
This is not an ordinary
Sunday in Watson-
ville. True, some
things go on as usual. The
discount clothing stores
along Freedom Boulevard
are doing some business,
crowds of brown men and
women line up outside the
movie theater to see Siete
Cadaveres, the little restau-
rants advertise regional
specialties like goat meat
enchiladas en el estilo de
Chiapas, field-hands chat on
street corners watching
passers-by, mothers with
babies dot the little park with
the decaying bandstand. It
could almost be a market
town in northern Mexico.
But it isn't. Watsonville is a
fast-growing city in eastern
Santa Cruz County,
California, the broccoli and
brussel sprouts capital of
America. And in the little
park the red-and-black eagle
banners of the United Farm
Workers are gathering next
to the mothers in their
Sunday best.
The UFW has come to
march in solidarity with the
close to 2,000 frozen food
workers here, members of
the Teamsters Cannery Local
912 who have been on strike
for over two months against
the two largest canneries in
the U.S. Eighty percent of
the workers are women,
overwhelmingly Mexicans or
Chicanas; women whose
lightning-fast fingers trim a
minimum of sixteen heads of
broccoli a minute to be
frozen, packed in flimsy
white boxes and shipped to
supermarkets all over the
country.
The rally is in progress in
another park across town,
where between two and
three thousand people are
listening to the speeches or
milling around, talking. A
few small delegations are
here from other unions. But
PROCESSED WORLD #15
the vast majority are cannery
and field workers, local
people. A CHP helicopter
circles obtrusively, a couple
of hundred feet overhead,
while dozens of riot police
are massing quietly at the
park's edge. A speaker
announces that the police
have withdrawn permission
for the march, but that the
organizers have decided to
march anyway. A roar of ap-
proval goes up from the
crowd. A few more minutes
and the march begins pour-
ing out of the park. The riot
police block off certain
streets but have obviously
been instructed to let the
march through, at least for
the time being. The crowd's
hatred and contempt for
them is obvious. "Son la
policia— de la caneria" two
young men chant; "they're
the cannery's own cops."
The march reaches the
gates of Watsonville Can-
ning, the company that pro-
voked the strike by offering a
non-negotiable contract that
made huge cuts in wages
and benefits. Riot cops, two
ines deep, block the
entrance to the plant. The
crowd swirls against them
like water backing up behind
a dam; nervous UFW ste-
wards try to keep the march
moving past the plant gate.
n the warm, foggy air there
is a sharp smell of trouble.
Mexican women, impracti-
cally dressed in skirts and
heels, yell insults at the
police: "Murderers! Beasts!
Racists!" "Break the line!
Break the line!" some of
them shout. "Who are they
kidding?" a Black woman
hollers, "I've been working
here for 13 years and I'm not
goin' back in for $4.75 an
hour!" Then the crowd spots
the Teamster officials behind
the police line. Conster-
nation. "What are you doing
over there?" "Get over
23
here!," the women yell, "You should be
on ihis side!"
Somehow, trouble is avoided. Too
many children in the crowd, perhaps.
Too many outsiders, too many cameras
and reporters. The march moves on, a
mile through back streets and out along
a concrete access road to Richard Shaw,
Inc., the second struck plant. The
helicopter keeps circling overhead,
inviting rude gestures and jeers from the
crowd. A few minutes of chanting
slogans into the clenched visored grins
of the riot police, and the marchers
disperse.
Carlos, a worker in the cannery and
self-appointed publicity director for the
strike, has arranged a meeting at his
home after the march. Several people
jam into his living room/kitchen while
children play in the adjoining bedroom.
These two tiny rooms and the bathroom
house Carlos, his wife Teresa, (also a
cannery worker) and their two children
at a rent of $300 a month — typical of
what seasonal workers have to pay for
equivalent or worse housing.
One of those present is Sergio Lopez, a
business agent for Local 912. Over the
last decade, he explains, the frozen food
industry in California has run into
trouble, most from intensified foreign
competition. Although the Watsonville-
area plants still processed 40". > of the
nation's frozen broccoli, brussels
sprouts, green peppers and spinach last
year, frozen broccoli imports have
increased dramatically, from 33 million
pounds in 1983 to 65 million pounds last
year. Watsonville companies also face
inroads from Mexican-grown vegetables
processed by non-union labor in Texas.
"Three years ago, the manager at
Watsonville Canning, Smiley Verduzco,
asked the workers for a break. He
promised to make it up in the next few
years." The workers in the lowest
bracket, comprising 90% of the work-
force, went along. They agreed to a cut
from $7.06, the industry standard, to
$6.66 an hour. When this contract
expired in June, the company offered a
"two-tier system" which would freeze
rates for current employees and hire new
ones at $4.25. In August, the workers
unanimously rejected the offer and
demanded a return to industry parity at
$7.06, as Verduzco promised.
After a series of propaganda meetings
with various groups of workers in the
plant, management simply implemented
its new plan without a contract. Then,
when the union brought in the Federal
Mediation Service, the gloves came off.
"We couldn't believe it" Lopez recalls.
"They offered $4.75 to existing workers
and $4.25 to new hires, and added 54
takeaways, including the dues checkoff
(automatic subtraction of union dues
from workers' paychecks). They elimi-
nated vacation pay for seasonal workers,
who are the majority. Everybody walked
out " In the last week of October,
management raised its offer to $5.05.
The strikers voted 800-1 against accep-
tance.
Shortly after the strike broke out at
Watsonville, rumors spread that Richard
Shaw Inc. was about to follow Watson-
ville's lead. Shaw's proposal turned out
not to be quite as drastic — a cut from
$7 06 to $6.66, the previous Watsonville
norm, and a mere 25 takeaways — but
workers at Shaw joined the walkout
anyway, in a bid to reduce the labor pool
available to each plant. Other area
canneries have extended their old
contracts with the union by one year,
waiting to see what happens at Watson-
ville.
For the first 8 weeks of the strike,
plants operated with 80-100 workers
apiece, far below the customary 1000-
2000. By all accounts, the strikers had
the support of the Watsonville commu-
nity Strike rally flyers in the windows of
many local stores confirm this impres-
sion, as did the fact that virtually no
locals were crossing the picket lines.
Lopez says that it was obvious to him
□ □□□ Bank of America ddddd
24
PROCESSED WORLD #15
the company had prepared for a strike
when he was called to State Superior
Court only five hours after the walkout
began, only to find three attorneys from
the nation's foremost union-busting law
firm, Littler, Mendelson, Fastiff &
Tichy, representing Watsonville Can-
ning. "The paperwork had been all
ready to go to Superior Court for a
restraining order, they probably already
had their affidavits full of lies prepared
beforehand." Quickly, the court moved
to limit the total number of pickets at
each plant to 60, and to forbid strikers
irom approaching within 100 yards of teh
gates. Since then, the picket limit has
dropped steadily, and now stands at four
to each gate.
Moreover, Lopez says that one week
before the strike, the company began "a
terrorist attack" on the workers. It
posted signs with new performance
standards (20 heads of broccoli per
minute instead of 16) and began termi-
nating and suspending people, especial-
ly workers with over fifteen years
seniority, "for really trivial reasons."
Despite all this, Lopez claims that
management's position is not as strong
as it looks.
"It's only a matter of time before they
start running out of product. They need a
full line of product or they can't find
buyers. If the mechanics, floor leaders,
lab workers, forklifters, and so on had
not walked out in such great numbers,
I'd be worried that the company would
get going in a matter of weeks. But no
way can they train 1000 workers with a
few supervisors. "
Carlos is less optimistic about the
possibility of winning the strike soon.
There are two peak seasons at the
cannery — the first one lasts from mid-
February to mid-May, the second begins
the first week in September and lasts
through November. Carlos says that in
the early season this year, the cannery
was producing much more than usual.
He figures they were already preparing
for the strike. Margarita, a floor leader
with 15 years seniority, postponed a
vacation to Mexico this year when she
realized the company was stockpiling
and heard supervisors discussing a
possible strike in the fall. Carlos believes
the strikers will have to ride out the
winter into spring, when the company
with the mood of the workers. Ap-
parently, the leadership has come not
from the three Teamster business agents
assigned to the two plants but from the
ranks of the workers. Some of these
unofficial organizers have no previous
experience in strikes, while others are
veterans. Jorge was active in the farm-
workers' organizing drives in the early
70s, and Carlos, then a university
student in public relations, did support
work for striking workers in his native
Mexico City. Both of them tell of the
total disorganization in the first few days
after the workers walked out.
Carlos: "We had a meeting to organ-
l um i wmj *! * <■ Mm,
"\ said 'Fine, what time is the meeting?' and [the
Teamsters] told me I couldn't come. I was really mad. I
tried to go in but they took me out by force."
will really begin losing a lot of money if
the plant isn't working at full capacity.
SELF-ORGANIZA TION
Several workers we interviewed com-
plained about the union's lack of mili-
tance in organizing the strike. Sergio
Lopez claims that the union could not
prepare beforehand because "we didn't
know who we sould be able to count on
during the strike, who would cross picket
lines." It is surprising, in that case, that
local union officials were so out of touch
*0**+m0*m\ i tm < iu i h » m
tie pickets, and it was a mess. One
person would say 'I'll take the 2 o'clock
shift, ' another 'I'll take a shift at 9, ' and
nobody was coordinating it. So I went
around signing people up on a schedule,
and handed out copies the next day.
Then we put a leaflet together and
collected money, you know how we do it
in Mexico, passing a little can around.
Someone told me: 'why don't you get
some money from the strike fund?' I
didn't know there was a strike fund! As
it turns out, there's a fund of $45 per
worker per week and the money was just
sitting in the bank! So I put a budget
PROCESSED WORLD #15
together and went down to the union
hall. They said they'd present it at their
meeting. I said Fine, what time is the
meeting?' and they told me I couldn't
come. I was really mad. I tried to go in
and they took me out by force. But they
accepted my budget. "
Even after the budget was approved,
it took Carlos a couple of frustrating days
to get through the Teamster bureaucra-
cy. He is hoping to get control of the
strike fund placed in the hands of elected
worker delegates. Currently there are
worker reps on the board that control the
funds, but they have no power because
they can't sign the checks.
Carlos spent the first $1,000 on three
spots on local TV. He placed the ads
during commercial breaks in the popular
Spanish-language soap opera Topacio.
"At first everyone thought that was bad,
to put our ads in the middle of a soap
opera. But I said 'hey, how many people
do you know that don't watch Topa-
cio?' "
Gloria and a few others complained
that the union is not doing enough to
help workers who have been arrested at
the picket lines:
"The union has a lot of money, it was
their duty to get the buy who was
arrested out of jail and we had to get the
money together 'cause they didn't do
it. "
Other complaints include lack of com-
munication from the union. Two weeks
into the strike, Local 912 called the first
\ +*mt* Hm t+****+++m***m+*
general membership meeting. "A union
guy talked for hours," Carlos recounts,
"and then another guy translated."
(Many of the workers speak very little
English). "Then the union guys said
they had to leave 'cause they had a court
date, and everyone left the hall." Carlos:
"Their speeches were a waste of time,
boring people with a long talk when what
was needed was to get things organized,
and let people air their grievances."
The strikers did not wait around for
union officials to call another meeting or
get things organized. On October 15, the
adhoc "Strike Committee" called a
general assembly which was attended by
over 500 workers. The assembly elected
six committees to handle various needs
arising from the strike. The finance com-
mittee coordinates the strike as a whole;
other committees handle publicity, child-
care, solidarity and outreach to other
workers and communities, and help in
collecting welfare and other public assis-
tance. Each committee consists of ten
delegates, five from each struck plant.
"A lot of people who got involved in the
committees didn't think they had any
talent for organizing or public speak-
ing," says Margarita. Now they're
finding out they can do it."
These facts are in contrast to the
picture presented by local and national
media (including the New York Times)
which tend to portray the strike's
militancy as the work of Teamsters for a
Democratic Union (TDU), a national
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26
PROCESSED WORLD #15
left-led caucus within the Teamster's
union. A handful of TDUers were active
in pushing the union to call for a strike,
they helped with support and publicity,
and organizing the October rally. Also,
local affiliates of the TDU Cannery
Workers' Project have emerged as
spokespeople for the strike, and two
TDUers were elected as delegates to the
strike committee. However, several
unaffiliated rank-and-file organizers we
spoke with remain somewhat suspicious
of the TDU, fearing that it wants to
would tail the scab vans back to nearby
towns where the strikebreakers were
dropped off at their homes. Strikers
would then approach them and try to
make their case. This method had some
success with Mexican workers, less with
the Filipinos and other ethnic groups the
company is bussing in. Now the situation
is hardening. The scab vans are
regularly pelted with rocks and bottles,
and an occasional molotov cocktail.
Loading dock pallets are regularly
burned. (During the weekend of October
"Are you kidding? You should have seen
this one nineteen-year old girl. She's the
one that got the windshield with the
rock."
Another woman line worker is even
more forthright. "Sure, I'd go 'round teh
back gate and kick the scabs' butts when
they came out. I'm not afraid of going to
jail. I've been there before." And more
ominously: "The Latino people, man,
they're not afraid of violence. They'll get
the scabs even if it has to be with
weapons, they'll scare the people off the
capture the leadership of the strike— in-
creasingly a collective process outside
union control — as part of a move to take
Local 912 away from the more con-
servative officials now in charge. "Sure,
there are problems with the union,"
Carlos says. "But we don't need this
right now. We can settle this stuff later,
in open meetings of the workers."
[When the strikers organized a second
march on November 3, the Teamsters
decided at the last minute to hold an
"official" rally one week later, and
urged the strikers to cancel their march,
which had already been publicized. The
strikers refused to change their plans.
As one woman put it "We've had a lot of
promises from the union. We'd rather
have two marches than no march and a
promise."]
DIRECT ACTION
Both mainstream media and the
Teamster bureaucracy blame TDU for
the "violence" and "vandalism" associ-
ated with the strike. In fact, since the
beginning of the strike, the workers have
been exerting all kinds of pressure, both
direct and indirect, to prevent the
companies from recruiting scabs and
moving them into the plants.
"At first, we would try to inform the
scabs and persuade them not to go in,"
says Gloria, pregnant mother of four and
a three-year veteran of Watsonville
Canning. At the end of the shift strikers
PROCESSED WORLD #15
5, a packing plant leased by Watsonville
Canning was burned to the ground. The
company blames the workers, four of
whom have been arrested on charges of
arson and attempted murder, but other
strikers point out that the plant was
tightly guarded and accuse the company
of pulling an inside job to discredit the
strike.) A woman worker tells of a
bar-owner who had been recruiting
scabs on commission. "The people went
to talk to him and convince him to cut it
"Women workers are
taking a role in the strike
that belies the cliche of the
submissive, downtrodden
Latina."
out. He didn't, so his windows got
smashed." She points out a man chat-
ting with friends on the street. "See that
guy? He owns a restaurant right by the
cannery. We found out he's been
helping scabs get in and out. So when we
win the strike, we're goin' to boycott
him." She chuckles.
Women workers are taking a role in
the strike that belies the cliche of the
submissive, downtrodden Latina. Carlos
l.iughs when asked whether women have
been involved in a particular incident.
busses."
Underlying the women's open, defiant
anger and displays of "masculine"
bravado are the subtler changes in the
traditional male-female relations the
cannery workers' life has brought about.
Many two-job couples with children,
separated from the network of female
relatives that would normally handle
childcare in such situations in Mexico,
are deliberately working different shifts
so that one parent is always home with
the kids. The men seem to have adapted
fairly well to their new role, though not
without some grumbling; at the October
15 meeting, one man half-jokingly pro-
posed a husband-care committee to go
with the one for childcare. "This kind of
change is especially important for Latino
men," says Margarita. "They're so used
to their women waiting on them hand
and foot."
A BLAZE CONTAINED?
The way in which an apparent weak-
ness—isolation from the normal Mexi-
can family support network — has be-
come a strength, seems to exemplify a
pattern in this strike. At first sight, the
strikers are in a poor position. As
(mostly) immigrants and seasonal work-
ers, they are not only uprooted from
their cultural and political background,
but linguistically isolated and vulnerable
to attack from the Immigration Service —
the hated "Migra." Yet these problems,
27
too, may turn out to have their useful
side. Because the Watsonville workers
are fairly homogenous, they tend to
stand together against an alien and often
hostile Anglo environment — personified
in everyone from the redneck plant
management that "treats us like stupid
children, like animals" as Carlos puts it,
to openly anti-immigrant Teamsters In-
ternational president Jackie Presser.
Correspondingly, the strikers are not as
subject as most U.S. workers to the
atomization and sense of powerlessness
that come from suburban dispersal and
the virtual disappearance of traditional
working-class community. Moreover,
the fact that their struggle has an
inescapably ethnic dimension may allow
them to tap into a powerful current of
support in Latino communities across the
country.
The bureaucratic inertia of the union,
too, has paradoxically become an advan-
tage. Faced with the footdragging of
Local 912 officials and the International,
the strikers have been forced to develop
their own organization, their own forms
of action. At least partially, they have
escaped the constrictions imposed by the
whole apparatus of union hierarchy,
labor legislation and "collective bar-
gaining" carried out by a few individual
highly-paid officials behind closed doors.
They have not challenged the nature and
content of their work — the boredom and
lack of control, the processing of vege-
tables that many wouldn't buy them-
selves (some workers laughed uproar-
iously when asked if they ate Watson-
ville Canning's products). But the effort
of self-organization and collective debate
have triggered questioning that is
already slicing deep into old assump-
tions. "You know, I was a model
worker,' says Margarita. "And I realized
I've given them my youth, and for
what?"
It would be easy to see the Watsonville
frozen food strike as archaic, part of the
dealh-struggle of old-style unionized
industrial labor; or as "exceptional"
because of its Mexican immigrant base.
In fact, the strikers have been lucky
enough to find a unique source of
strength in their heritage, but the
conditions they face are both modern
and universal; the cold hand of business
power snatching back the gains won at
such cost over half a century. Moreover,
their situation highlights the fact that
national boundaries are increasingly
illusory in a global corporate economy.
As San Francisco offices fill up with
workers from Mexico, Central America,
and Asia, factories are moved south and
east in search of cheaper, more intimi-
dated labor. If Watsonville looks almost
like part of Mexico, of the "Third
World," this only reminds us that much
of the "Third World" is now highly
industrialized, and by many of the same
corporations whose offices we work in
here. The glaciers of multinational
capital, like a new Ice Age, cover the
globe. The courage, resourcefulness and
insistence on rank-and-file democracy
shown by the Watsonville strikers
provide a valuable example to all who
seek to roll those glaciers back.
— by Caitlin Manning &
Louis Michaelson
ft»**WM»«m**f**l«MM^^
me young
METEOROLOGIST
Editions available in English, Spanish and Jargon
Clearly, one of the most devasta-
ting effects of the current administra-
tion's budget cuts has been the awful
weather we've been having these past
years. While everyone talks about it,
and some even purport to take action,
we of the Weather Action Group are
at the vanguard of the struggle
against excess precipitation. We
believe that the time for umbrellas
and raincoats has passed. Staying
indoors is apathetic escapism. We
must sieze the offensive and begin a
constructive plan for climatological
self-determination. That's why we
say: "RAIN, RAIN, GO AWAY!"
Any principled discussion of this
issue must first begin with a critical
examination of the previous attempts
to halt the torrents of fat cats and
running dogs that Reagan claims are
merely "trickling down" on the
outdoor working class. Many have
tried, but look out your window and
you can see that they have failed.
Why? Let's look at a few examples.
The Weather Underground: They
believed that their violent acts could
spark the drenched masses to take up
arms against the downpour of oppres-
sive moisture. But violence begets
more violence. Where are they today?
Washed up by a flood of state
repression.
The Freeze Movement: The trouble
here is that they refuse to face the
broader issues. Once we freeze the
water, where are we going to put it?
And further, who will control it? Will
the resultant wealth be used on the
part of the frozen foods industry? And
what about poor people who need to
drink water, shall they suck ice
cubes?
Even the Democrats give lip service
to the weather; but remember, NO
MATTER WHO REIGNS, THE POOR
GET SOAKED!
We at WAG say the time has come
to change all this. Our strategy is to
build coalitions with other warm-
weather loving peoples. We are
calling for a letter writing campaign to
get some dry kindling. Most impor-
tantly, to counter the cynical propa-
ganda of weather reports we will hold
high the shining example of the
Albanian Republic, that bastion of
planned weather. In Albania, thanks
to the valiant revolutionary meteoro-
logists, it only rains once a week, and
then only at night. And you can bet no
one leaves any tools out in the rain.
But you never hear about this from
weather reporters; they know that in a
truly just society they'd have to work
for a living. Trust our plan: we can
bring an end to this tyrannical
weather by June (or July at the
latest).
Remember, GOOD DRAINAGE IS
NOT ENOUGH!!
For more information call our 24
hour hotline: (415)936-6478
(415) WE MOIST
28
PROCESSED WORLD #15
ontgomery Street morning smells good in a new
grey suit, white shirt and tie, attache case and a full
| wallet. Tips of the skyscrapers cut through the
rolling pink-white clouds into blue. People hurry, brush
by, excuse themselves with automatic smiles. Howling
young messengers speed old bicycles recklessly through
packed intersections. The city wakens and bustles to its
responsibilities.
On the last block before the office, I picked up speed
and almost knocked him over, the little old man who stood
suddenly before me as if dropped from a space-ship,
pleading in a voice low but hoarse, "Ya got a buck for
food?" I stammered, rushed by without answering, and
looked back to see him staring at me, hand still out. He
was old enough to be my father, pure white hair, red skin,
old blue pants torn and hanging, beard grown long and
aimless, blood hardening under his left eye. I felt a chill
and, still looking backwards, crashed into a garbage can.
Regaining my balance, I touched my leg where the pain
was. The day felt already disordered. I took the rest of the
way to the office slowly.
A few blocks from home I often meet a small woman
who travels with her bags. She gives the impression of
age, with the thick lines that fill her face, and her grey
scraggly hair, but I'm told she is not more than 40. Her
bags are old paper shopping bags that are tearing at their
handles. They are overfull; clothes and papers are always
falling out onto the sidewalk. Her feet, with their large
purple veins, are visible through gaping holes in her
sneakers. A sick-looking terrier follows her everywhere.
She stops to window-shop at garbage containers and
shopping center dumpsters. I look at her, trying to take
her in before she notices me. That day it's too late; she
adjusts her waddle and approaches me. Her little blue
eyes are deeply bloodshot. Her brown smock is cearing
down the middle. She is bent by the weight of her
shopping bags. She comes impermissibly close, leaning a
bag against my leg and eyeing my red shirt. I smell urine
coming from her. She glances at me apologetically as she
touches, then fondles, the left shirt cuff. She looks
greedily at the material, then up at me with long-suffering
eyes and says, "I'd like this for my son," nodding a few
times for emphasis and smiling with strange hopefulness.
I arrive at the corner of Montgomery and Pine,
surrounded by moving walls of business suits. Yet the
open brown hand reaches out to me alone. The skinny
dark man moves his lips frenetically and only tortured
bursts of sound escape. His hair is greasy reddish-brown.
He wears purple pants. He is frighteningly thin. His
mouth shakes more than it speaks, a stuttering foghorn.
"Sa — sa — sir" His hand shakes hard in front of me, his
eyes try to steady themselves to meet mine. "Sa— sir— wa
— wa— wou — ha — ha— ha— hav— si — so— so— so— som-
som— mo— mo— mon— mon— mon" He vibrates pain-
fully. I'd just been in a thick crowd; now I'm alone, facing
the man and blocked from escape by a spiteful convoy of
cars. "Plah — plah — puh — sah — pie— sa— sa— sa — sa— sa
— sar— sar— pie — sir" Drops of saliva slip over his lower
lip; I shake my head and look away.
I could become the Old Garbage Man in 25 years if I
PROCESSED WORLD #15
29
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PROCESSED WORLD #15
ontgomery Street morning smells good in a new
grey suit, white shirt and tie, attache case and a full
wallet. Tips of the skyscrapers cut through the
rolling pink-white clouds into blue. People hurry, brush
by, excuse themselves with automatic smiles. Howling
young messengers speed old bicycles recklessly through
packed intersections. The city wakens and bustles to its
responsibilities.
On the last block before the office, I picked up speed
and almost knocked him over, the little old man who stood
suddenly before me as if dropped from a space-ship,
pleading in a voice low but hoarse, "Ya got a buck for
food?" I stammered, rushed by without answering, and
looked back to see him staring at me, hand still out. He
was old enough to be my father, pure white hair, red skin,
old blue pants torn and hanging, beard grown long and
aimless, blood hardening under his left eye. I felt a chill
and, still looking backwards, crashed into a garbage can.
Regaining my balance, I touched my leg where the pain
was. The day felt already disordered. I took the rest of the
way to the office slowly.
A few blocks from home I often meet a small woman
who travels with her bags. She gives the impression of
age, with the thick lines that fill her face, and her grey
scraggly hair, but I'm told she is not more than 40. Her
bags are old paper shopping bags that are tearing at their
handles. They are overfull; clothes and papers are always
falling out onto the sidewalk. Her feet, with their large
purple veins, are visible through gaping holes in her
sneakers. A sick-looking terrier follows her everywhere.
She stops to window-shop at garbage containers and
shopping center dumpsters. I look at her, trying to take
her in before she notices me. That day it's too late; she
adjusts her waddle and approaches me. Her little blue
eyes are deeply bloodshot. Her brown smock is cearing
down the middle. She is bent by the weight of her
shopping bags. She comes impermissibly close, leaning a
bag against my leg and eyeing my red shirt. I smell urine
coming from her. She glances at me apologetically as she
touches, then fondles, the left shirt cuff. She looks
greedily at the material, then up at me with long-suffering
eyes and says, "I'd like this for my son," nodding a few
times for emphasis and smiling with strange hopefulness.
I arrive at the corner of Montgomery and Pine,
surrounded by moving walls of business suits. Yet the
open brown hand reaches out to me alone. The skinny
dark man moves his lips frenetically and only tortured
bursts of sound escape. His hair is greasy reddish-brown.
He wears purple pants. He is frighteningly thin. His
mouth shakes more than it speaks, a stuttering foghorn.
"Sa— sa — sir" His hand shakes hard in front of me, his
eyes try to steady themselves to meet mine. "Sa— sir— wa
— wa — wou — ha — ha— ha— hav— si — so— so— so— som—
som — mo— mo— mon — mon — mon" He vibrates pain-
fully. I'd just been in a thick crowd; now I'm alone, facing
the man and blocked from escape by a spiteful convoy of
cars. "Plah — plah — puh — sah — pie— sa — sa — sa— sa— sa
— sar— sar— pie — sir" Drops of saliva slip over his lower
lip; I shake my head and look away.
I could become the Old Garbage Man in 25 years if I
PROCESSED WORLD #15
29
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30
PROCESSED WORLD #15
by Bob McGlynn, a.k.a. The Enigmatic Emissary
(opinions expressed here are mine and not that of
any group or organization of messengers)
e was riding his bike on 46th toward Broadway. Up
ahead was an illegally double-parked bus going in
reverse, and across from the bus was a car that was
pulling out of a parking lot, ready to enter 46th. The biker
had the right of way but signaled the car anyway to let her
know he would be proceeding on. The car driver
accelerated, and the biker was caught between the
forward motion of the car and the reversing bus. His body
was crushed and he lost one leg immediately in a pool of
blood. The cops showed up but basically did nothing. They
didn't even fill out an accident report. They let the driver
go. It was another biker who called the ambulance and
found out the guy's name before he lost consciousness.
The cops were white; the driver was white and was
seemingly drunk. The biker was Black. ..and a NYC
bicycle messenger."*
* a true story
PROCESSED W0RLD*15
I remember once asking at a meeting of 50 bike
messengers, "has anyone here not had an accident?" No
one raised their hands.
Such is the reality of bicycle messengering beneath the
human interest stories which romanticise "those noncon-
formist free spirits, going for the big bucks" and/or
condemning us for murderous wild riding, "law
breaking," "bad attitudes,'' "mental retardation," etc.
I find that many peoples' overcuriosity about bike
messengers borders on the neurotic. "You do that!?...
Wow..." or (jealously) "Well you've got some freedom
but you can't do it all your life you know." Perhaps they
want/need a little of that "free spirit" stuff: the relative
frontier of the open street vis-a-vis the unnatural enclosed-
ness of 9 to 5 land can be quite intriguing with its danger
and autonomy.
I'm going to concentrate on my own experience as a
bike courier, although there are many types of
messengers, primarily foot messengers, truckers, MC's
(motorcyclists), and your occasional skateboarder or roller
skater.
Bikers work mostly for messenger companies that
specialize in messengering, although some companies
(say in the film industry) employ their own in-house
bikers. ■,-,
What we do ib simple, we ride to one
place, pick up ('p u ' in our lingo) a
letter, package, whatever, put it in a bag
strapped around our back, and deliver it
to another place. We get most jobs by
continuously calling up our company
dispatcher who directs us to the next
assignment The alternative if you feel
like saving phone money (we aren t
reimbursed for phone calls, although
many clients let us use their phones for
free), is to go back to the company to get
assigned more work, but that's normally
ineflicienl. It we're lucky, we'll get a few
jobs at a time — if things are slow, we'll
gel them one at a time, or none We get
paid mostly on both a piece rate and
commission basis. We get paid per job
and gel paid a percentage of the job cost
i e what the client is charged) So if ihe
average minimum cost for a midtown
pickup and delivery is about $5.50, and
the average commission is 50"", then we
make $2.75 for that job. Many compan-
ies have additional costs added on for ex-
tra distance traveled ("zones"), size and
weight of pickup (oversize), waiting time
(if the p.u. isn't ready when we get
there), etc. Some of us make another
5-10% on rain or snow days. If we kill
ourselves and ride hard and fast without
breaks, a number of us can make a
Xife '<h4fell
1982 by Matt Groening
generalized average of about $9 an hour,
but others, who are newcomers or who
aren't so lucky or adept, make $5.00 an
hour. There are also slow periods when
everyone is making shit. Legendary
stories about how we're all making $100
a day ain't true. And I've never met
anyone that's clearing $18,000 a year
(not that some lone lucky maniac isn't
pulling that). Ya gotta take breaks in this
business (plus we have to cover bike
repairs and all other expenses related to
the job). Last but not least, we are (on
paper) "Independent Contractors":
meaning we are "our own bosses," and
not employees. More on that BULLSHIT
later.
Bicycle messengering began as a new
industry somewhere around 1972. It was
started by my first boss, who later got
forced out in a scandal where he was
illegally charging us for workers'
compensation and then pocketing the
money for his coke habit. His wife took
the company over— (She was formerly a
biker who worked for and then married
him — and then divorced him — Yo, Dal-
las in NYC!. There's a couple of
thousand of us, almost exclusively male,
60% Black and Hispanic (mostly Black),
40% White (years ago I'd say it was
more like 50-50), average ages 18-late
20s. We do have our handful of 50-70
year old heroes, and as the years go by,
^yu^x
32
there's an increasing amount of "old-
ies"— people who stick with it year after
year getting into their late 20s and early
30s.
In general many of us do fit the
outlaw-counterculture-street person
image (with no apologies from us), that
we're either romanticized or condemned
for. A lot of us wouldn't be caught dead
working in an office or factory (that's our
preference — we ain't the snobs!) and
biking is an easy place to find work. The
scene is extremely transitory, companies
are incessantly hiring, plus they overhire
"to keep themselves covered" which
fucks everyone, especially the newcom-
ers because there's less work to go
around. On the other hand it's often
the only gig in town — no one else is
hiring — so we end up with a crowd of
poor types trying to make a buck and
also some arty and intellectual sorts who
can't make any bread at their profession.
All in all there's a great deal of
camaraderie among us as the joints are
passed and tools are shared — it is
especially apparent when we rush to the
side of a biker that's been hurt in an
accident in this bohemia of the streets.
The hellos exchanged in elevators, the
whistles, the bikes, their speed, the
nicknames, dread locks, colorful or torn
clothes, sleek biking clothes, grimy and
sweaty faces, fingerless gloves, and the
superficial command of the day definite-
ly makes bikers a "cool" group. The
City is "ours" as we have an aura of
strength that lacks of any trace of
uneasiness or intimidation; we know who
we are and where we are going and for
this we reap a type of "respect." People
will "stand aside" as we flash in and out
of offices.
On the other hand, biking can be a
grueling fuck of a job: dealing with the
traffic, weather, cops, stolen bikes or
bike parts, stuck up office workers and
bosses, bus tailpipe in our faces,
pollution, discrimination ("Are you a
messenger? Please sign in before taking
the elevator"), painful loads, exhaus-
tion, and the accidents we all eventually
have. The "Independent Contractor"
status imposed by the companies is a
joke. By claiming we are not employees,
they don't have to worry about workers
compensation or health plans, unem-
ployment insurance, paid sick days
(we're sort of prone to things like colds,
sore throats, etc.), paid personal days
(maybe our work is kind of hard and we
need breaks once in a while?), holiday
pay, etc., etc. Additionally, it makes us
responsible for all job related gear and
expenses like our bikes, bags, locks,
tools, rain/snow gear, bike repairs and
phone calls It's a legalistic fiction and
ruse since the real social relationship we
have with the companies is like that of
any other boss/worker situation. On the
other hand the game is a plus for us
PR0CESSEDW0RLD#15
because they don't take taxes out of
our paychecks, and our work expenses
are tax deductible (although I don't know
of any bikers that keep track of their
phone calls!). We are not off the books
though, as our companies file our wages
and we're required to figure out and pay
our taxes like everyone else. But it does
leave the outlaws among us with some
fun opportunities that the State and Feds
are well aware of. For their own oppor-
tunistic reasons, they are trying to
abolish the Independent Contractor
bit and are battling
out that gray
legal area
with the
companies.
After all, if
couriers don't pay
their "dues," how
will Ronnie and Nancy
be able to afford to eat?!
So in 1982 along comes Creitzer with a
vengeance, and the process of formu-
lating a bill to regulate bikers began.
Some of the original proposals were
totally bizarre. They included the
creation of a wholesale new bureaucracy
to license and regulate all bikers, shit
like having messengers pay $1 ,000 ( ! ) for
a license, requiring us to have large
identification signs attached to "the
baskets" on either side of our bikes
I remember once
Messengers Organize Resistance
No messengers ever knew any of this
shit was going on, but some of the
bosses were in on the proceedings. They
were opposed to the regulations because
they didn't want the added bureaucracy
of keeping a trip record, they would in all
probability be the ones to have to issue
the ID cards, etc., and they didn't
need their business getting
screwed up because their
workers were being
_ _ _ t , t stopped by the cops
asking at a meeting of 50 bike messengers, ™ d ,s^5^
'has anyone here not had an accident?' monlh[l ^lZtZ
before the City Council vote,
No one raised their hands. ' noticed a news p*p er article
City Government Decides to Regulate
Last but not least is our problem with
the city where our "coming of age"
comes in. The spark (for the city) started
when Councilwoman Carol Creitzer was
almost hit by a biker. (She was unsure
whether it was 2 messenger or not.) Now
good old Carol is your prototypical snob,
just the kind of person your biker loves
to hate, and in this situation, the
visa-versa was very important; she
began a crusade to get bikers regulated
and licensed. The climate was certainly
ripe — it's clean up and control time in
America.
In the context of an increasingly
gentrified NYC, clean up and control
also meant a few local specifics such as:
restricting food vendors (from whom the
working class gets a relatively cheap and
quick lunch) from midtown Manhattan
and other parts of NYC, further regu-
lation of cabbies that would have put
uniforms on them — and of course — get-
ting those rowdy messengers (there are
other things of course, like NYC cops
cleaning up graffiti by beating to death
graffiti artists like Michael Stewart).
As an aggregate we messengers mess
with the clean-cut sensibilities of the
new "for the rich only" urbanization. It
was bicycle messengers out of that trio,
though, that ended up losing. This was
due in part to the fact that messengers
weren't organized. Organization is dif-
ficult because of our scattered "factory"
of the streets" atomization. We were
easy to pick on by politicians who wanted
to score political points with consti-
tuencies whose prejudicial popular wis-
dom (fed by media distortion and the
pols) had us pegged as crazies who
unendingly mow down innocent civil-
ians.
(What a gem! The last time I saw anyone
with wire baskets was in 1966 in the
suburbs. No one has them in our
industry!), and forcing bike couriers to
keep a log of all their trips. Eventually
the bill the City Council would vote on
was:
1) We'd have to carry a special ID card
2) We'd have to have a license plate on
our bikes
3) We'd have to wear a uniform jacket
or T-shirt with our company's name
and our license number
4) The companies would have to keep
a record of our trips
Criminal penalties would be applied:
$100-250 fine and/or 15 days in jail for
not complying.
fc|ne
Minute
Manager
on my company's office wall
concerning the regulations. I knew
my boss taped it up and asked her
what the story was. She started bragging
that she'd been fighting it all along with
a "where were you guys" attitude. I
clued her in that we were never notified
of anything by anyone. But so much for
that bull — it was panic time!
I immediately booked out to a phone
and called a biker friend to get some
organizing going; the messenger insur-
rection had begun! A bright pink leaflet
by "Rough Riders" was issued entitled
"WAR!! -CITY COUNCIL VS. BIKE
MESSENGERS" explaining what was
happening and calling for a meeting.
Fifty workers came to this meeting from
a group that's always been accused of
being "too individualistic" and "utterly
unorganizable." The "Independent
Couriers Association" (ICA) was born
that night ("Rough Riders" lost out as a
name — oh well, too bad) which would be
non-exclusionary; all messengers (foot,
truck, etc.) would be welcome as would
company office workers. But because of
emergency circumstances regarding bi-
kers, the flavor of organizing would orbit
around us. Structurally the ICA was
loose and democratic with a core of the
most interested (people who regularly
did the shit work, went to all meetings,
etc.). Women played a role out of pro-
portion to their small numbers in the
bike messenger force. Over the next few
weeks, we planned and did the works:
we issued petitions, had phone-in cam-
paigns and wrote letters to the mayor,
City Council, and media — we demon-
strated, lobbied, leafletted, held press
conferences and chaotic "war-party"
meetings of 50-100 bikers in the middle
of Greenwich Village's Washington
Square Park.
The heat was on; the cops were
harassing the crap out of us — enforcing
chickenshit laws to the max like ticketing
PROCESSED WORLD #15
33
us for not having bells (Gimme a break —
a loud "yo" or a whistle will do it,
nobody needs the distraction of taking a
hand off a brake to ring a bell no one
may hear) or not bearing to the edge of
traffic (the most dangerous place for us
since people open car doors which we
crash into— being "doored" — pedestri-
ans walk in front of us from in between
parked trucks where we can't see them
(crash) etc., etc.), and most importantly,
for going through red lights and the
wrong way down streets. Many stories
circulated about bikers getting ticketed
for laws they didn't break, getting
beaten up by the cops, and snagged by
special police traps set up around mid-
town. Black couriers were getting it
worse, and eventually we issued a
special police complaint form for bikers
to fill out. The media, of course, was
uniformly opposed to us and backed the
law.
Ostensibly the reason for the proposed
bill was to help identify us if we hurt
someone. It was also meant to deter us
from busting red lights and booking the
opposite way on one way streets, since if
caught, we'd either have "proper ID" to
get summoned (as opposed to giving a
phony name and then ripping up the
ticket), or else we'd have to pay stiff
penalties. It all sounded sooo reasonable
to a culture drowning in
bureaucracy
and
servility. To us it was an unnecessary,
unworkable and abusive affront.
Why were we singled out to carry a
special apartheid-like ID? The law did
not concern all bikes, but only commer-
cial bike riders (which besides us would
also include delivery people from
Chinese restaurants, drug stores, gro-
ceries, etc. — but clearly these laws
would not be enforced against them) and
was therefore discriminatory. The issue
of hitting people was bullshit. We do
often ride wild (we have to to make a
buck), but hurting anyone is a rarity —
we're the "pros" out there while your
normal biker is not. Statistics backed us
up that we were involved in few
collisions and they don't say who's fault
those accidents were. We know damn
well most accidents are the pedestrians'
fault (The New York Times that opposed
us admitted that in an article). Stories
abound about "those crazy riders, one of
them almost hit me the other day!" — the
key word (for us) being "almost."
Bicycle messengers are like any of the
rest of the "controlled chaos" of NYC's
cabs, cars, pedestrians, etc.; we gotta
get to where we're goin', and fast! , with
the inter-hostility and danger among us
all being mutual. Our position was: Hey,
if a messenger hurts someone,
let him/her be dealt with
like anyone else in a similar situation.
All counter arguments against us were
in the realm of "What if" — what if we
break a light, hit a pedestrian and kill
them? Well how about "What if a
pedestrian breaks a light, jay-walks in
front of a courier, the courier swerves
over but it's into a racing truck?" Should
jay-walking be forcibly outlawed? Should
pedestrians have IDs tatooed on to their
foreheads? Perhaps midtown should be
cleared of everyone. Both the light
breaking biker and pedestrian have the
same attitude— "give us a break,
it's no big deal.
Crowded,
fast-
paced
urbani-
34
PROCESSED WORLD #15
zation is a sick unfortunate fact, and
those of us stuck in it basically do the
best we can with the marginal inconven-
ience we cause each other
The uniform was the most disgusting
thing; shove it we said, we are not
prisoners or slaves (and if there were a
license plate with the same info, why
have it twice?) What if we forgot our
uniform or ID card one day or our plate
got stolen — should we get busted for
that?
It would also clearly be unworkable
and chaotic. There were no provisions in
the bill for any central issuing agency or
coordinating center.
How would
cops
shouldn't we be able to do it?" Being
prevented from doing so was our worst
fear, and the law could definitely put a
crimp in our style. Freedom of the road
was a necessity since time and money
were synonymous.
In all probability, though, the war
against us was that type of political show
that emerges every so often (headlines
screaming "Crackdown on Pushers!"
"Crackdown on Cabs!", one columnist
labeled us "The Killer Bikes"), and
eventually the cops would pay attention
to more important stuff and basically
leave us alone (thereby the whole thing
being a waste of
everyone's . -„.=\»,V ! */V >v //f '
time). .vsv'i*'
HW*"
So then came the process of hammer-
ing out the specifics for the regulations
like who would issue the license plates,
what color would they be and other
nonsense The ICA demanded to be in on
thai meeting, and that was accepted. (I
had reservations about being in on my
own "self-managed" oppression, but I
wanted to observe the show.) In atten-
dance was the ICA, company bosses,
and reps from the mayor's office, Dept.
of Transportaiton and the cops.
Then the fun began. The people from
the city didn't know anything about how
messengering works, and it was quite a
laugh watching them trying to figure
>>-. -•■ • how to implement a turkey
of a law that would
have no central
coordination.
For
s/£('iv"- m ft / A nave no cer
%
wh
messenger
and who's not? Would
they summons someone on a bike
who didn't have the license, etc., but
Wasn't a messenger? If they tried to
summons a messenger, what would stop
the messenger from saying she/he
wasn't one? Although most messengers
carry similar bags and have a certain
look, there's no way a cop couid reaily
prove whether someone was really a
courier on the spot What if we're out
riding one day with our standard courier
bag but were not actually working that
day and we get stopped? What about the
person who's not a courier but digs our
bags and carries one — will they be
stopped by the cops for not having a
license? This opened up a big area for
j|"We owe*,
f?;^ nothing to a society* ;^
that would burn out its young
, on danger-ridden streets in an f#£-
envelope of polluted dirty!***
j^f orange haze no matter
*I*how "hip" our job
;^may appear £/
%
Practical Subversion
V
But back to the City Council. Pre-
dictably they passed the bill with only
one abstention, Miriam Friedlander (a
supposed "progressive," she later sup-
ported it when the bill was partially
modified) and one no vote^
The bill then went on for Mayor
Koch's signature — but there was a
surprise on that day. Fifty angry bikers
showed up (while losing work time) to
testify against the bill. Koch did some-
thing he never does; he postponed
to be.":
pohc fas< ism and being that a lot of us Slg ning it, which was a moral victory in
•ire longhairs Blacks, etc, we didn't the fray it nothing else. We succeeded in'
warn the fuzz having an extra excuse to setting the tone and atmosphere for the,
tuck with us We also tried to make day . we put the city in the embarassmg
1111,1 cause Wlth bicycle clubs but position of being the bully picking on an
they didn't show too much interest. ass busting, hard-working, "defense-
Our most militant argument was: WE less ' group of young people. Soon after
IUST WEREN'T CONNA DO IT 1 And as of course, he did sign it with one
for the obvious law-breaking stuff— provision watered down; the criminal
going against the lights and the wrong penalties for not having the ID card
way down the streets — the most vocal would be dropped, and the fine for tnat
amongst us said it quite plainly: "Why reduced to $50 — big deal, right?
PROCESSED WORLD #15
Archie
Spigner,
Slack conserv-
ative who made
like he dug "the
hard-working under-
dog." Being one of the
only City Council 3rd World
people, he was awake enough to
know that Blacks would be set up
or harassment, and he brought in
the NAACP to back us Political op-
portunism being what it is though, we
never heard from him after the bill
signing — which leads me to a dig I just gotta
gel in. Big deal City Councilwoman, Ruth
Mcssmger, was a prime backer of the bill.
Messinger is a member of the Democratic
5o< ialists of America and a darling and a halt
with the mainstream "Left" in NYC. I
love how conservatives like Spigner can
act more hip than "democratic socialists"
^-iwho have no more problem legislating
SsTor l«J. without conferring with us even!)
~ ' ^rr^^shit on the working class than
ffl^fo ^{j|jjg^Slalinists do with using rifle
butts to get their way I
uc-ss we re one "cause" she had no interest in
35
instance, the law said the license was to
only have three digits. Add on to that the
fa< t that there would be no central list to
refer to, and you'd have a lot of bikers
with the same number 1 Who should be
. ('sponsible for getting the plates, signs,
and ID cards, the companies or the
riders? Were we employees? Were we
Independent Contractors? In a major
victory before the negotiations started
they dropped the uniform bit — but we'd
have to have some sort of "sign" on our
backs
We asked (satirically) "How are you
gonna contact all those thousand of
Chinese restaurants and groceries and
tell them and their tens of thousands of
commercial bike delivery people about
this?" It was good watching the fools
enter territory of which they knew not
The police lieutenant was the best as he
kept quiet, slouched crumped up in his
chair, chain smoking and smiling at the
circus — "Hey lieutenant, do you think
we can store the trip records (records for
around 15-20 million jobs a year!) in a
police warehouse or something?" "Yea,
uh, I guess we got room in a corner
somewhere "
Because the whole thing was so dumb
and because we used our brains, we
managed to get important modifications
and concessions. Also, the plate under
our seats would not be the large size the
city planned on which would have been
hell for our thighs and crotches as we
mounted and dismounted. It could be as
small as possible, as long as the
company name (or abbreviation) and
license number can fit in one inch letters
and numbers (did any of the jerks ever
ride a bike?) The sign on our back could
simply be another license plate attached
to our bag. We would't back down on our
insistence though, that the whole "sign"
idea had to go. The city said "they'd
consider it" (bullshit). We also demand-
ed the cops have a meeting with us to
discuss the way they were fucking with
us bad That "uppityness" astounded
them' They agreed to "arrange a
meeting" (more bullshit). We also
managed to get the implementation of
the law postponed. The most important
thing won was a method of circum-
venting the thing altogether (Sorry
readers, for security reasons I'll have to
ask you to use your imaginations) — we
walked out of the meeting smirking.
And so the charade went into effect
January 85 in all its predictability. The
heat from the cops had already cooled
(ill . and the deadline for complying with
the law came and went with zero fanfare.
I'd say 75% plus of bikers aren't
complying Many are refusing and
others work at companies that aren't
even supplying the ID and stuff. The
maionty of those that do, do it only
partially — they'll have the plate but not
the sign, or visa-versa. Some will have a
plate but keep it in their bag I saw one
plate that was on backwards!
The Song Remains The Same
Bikers remain the same, busting
lights and tearing down the street the
wrong way, hopping sidewalks and
riding in the (safe) middle of traffic.
There's been no mad rush by us to install
"bells' on our "killer bikes." The pave-
ment ahead remains our prey Cone are
only the screaming headlines against us
A terrorized" city is back to the old
grind cursing us only under the breath as
we do them amid the hassle and hustle
but general harmlessness (as regards
sheer safety) of it all, just trying to
survive in a speeded-up world not made
by or for the majority of any of us And
please — if you've read an inference into
this article of "Fuck the cabbies,"
Fuck the pedestrians," the way others
say "Fuck the bikers," it wasn't meant
Not that bikers don't engage in the same
infantile prejudices that others direct
against us But mane hatreds and pre-
judices get us nowhere The point is to
look out tor and love each other
dummies'
It's good to see a nicely working
dialectic sometimes. The bike regula-
tions that were meant to repress us
provided the catalyst for the only
sustained bicycle messenger organiza-
tion ever The ICA Some prior attempts
included couriers at one company that
was overhirmg too much trying to
organize a union. That attempt fell apart
in a few weeks. The Service Employees
Intern uional Union tried it on a
city-wide basis some time ago, but alter
some months that too faded. Of recent
memory is the Teamsters Some mes-
sengers who had a Teamster visit were
glad when the amazingly stereotypical
mob type character left (reportedly he
reterred to the onl\ woman courier there
.is "honey" and said you tellas don't
mind it I (all her honey, do you?" to
which one guts\ gu\ said "don't vou
think vou should ask her?").
The word union is certainly scary to
the bosses, but so do some bikers have
problems with it I hey fear it would
mean the loss ot the Independent
contractor status, and they'd have to
late the regimentation ot taxes being
PROCESSED WORLD #15
pulled from their paychecks, they'd have
to punch in and out (because some
companies are lax now about your
comings and goings and taking days off)
and no company will pay an hourly wage
similar to what can be made on com-
mission. Besides unions have a bad
name for being self-serving authorita-
rian bureaucracies — just the thing that
many messengers dig escaping. There
are examples though of other types of
"Independent Contractors" that have
ers comes in. Capital is finding it much
more efficient to bypass and circumvent
the sometimes inefficiency of the Post
Office and use the immediacy of such as
bike messengers, private package car-
riers, and machinery that can zap text
and graphics from one locale to another
in seconds (Ironically less work — in
terms of increased speed, efficiency and
agility — often means more work here as
peddling is harder than hoofing it, and
because we can do more jobs per hour,
points of a future rebellion against this
dollar- and object-centric society, and for
a people- and life-oriented one? Imagine
a coalition of the street (couriers) and
office (secretaries, computer program-
mers, etc.) — Yo! It's the Revolution!
OK, OK, so it's silly fantasy, but such
wild imaginings have a habit of
becoming very real in history a la France
'68, Poland's Solidarity, or say Black
insurrection in South Africa. If the farm-
workers out west could get organized,
"Bicycle messengers as a group aren 't exactly your young Republi-
can types and would make an interesting addition to a backward,
comatose and dying American labor movement.
successfully bargained with employers
without losing their status. In any case
most all couriers agree that we need our
own group; we have a legitimate basis to
organize for our welfare.
So the ICA lives on Whether they can
get the messenger regulations junked
remains to be seen. They hold regular
meetings, publish a newsletter and are
concerned with everything from potholes
to the lack of workers' compensation
some riders are faced with. A grant has
been received, a messenger concert/
bash is planned and the ICA has even
gotten some bike shops to give discounts
to its card carrying members The
"unorganizable" have remained or-
ganized an ironic anomaly in the age of
Reagan ..... _
rheorefical Insurrectional Addendum
, ...Bicycle messengers as a group aren't
c\.n tl\ your young Republican types and
would make an interesting addition to a
backward, comatose and dying Ameri-
can labor movement Delivery services
seem to be a growing industry amid (he
Adhering ul your more tr.iduion.il blue
collar staples such as steel information
as su( h has become a highly valued
commodity and bicycle couriers, along
with others such as computer workers,
make up some of the labor of that
( ircuitry The narrowing of gaps in space
by speeding up time is what makes your
messenger on a ten-speed hurtling
across midtown or your relative Federal
Lxpress efficiency attractive to a capita-
lism pathologically hungry for profits
that depends on getting things done as
quickly as possible. This is where the
pivotal importance of information pro-
cessors, circulators and transport work-
then we are gonna do more jobs per
hour. The same goes for the secretary
and the word processor vs the secretary
and typewriter — because stuff can be
typed quicker and more efficiently with
the former, then that secretary is gonna
be loaded with that much more work.)
That which is so important to the
circuitry of Capital can also be its short
circuitry. Neither messenger companies
nor their clients can store away mes-
senger runs for instance, like a coal
company might hoard coal in anticipa-
tion of a strike Any job action by
couriers would have an immediate
debilitating effect on those concerned.
We can cut power off at its source and
sever completely the lives of transmis-
sion . -. "*■•••.
"' Why not ? We owe nothing'to a society
that would burn out its young on danrjer-
ridden streets in an envelope of polluted
dirty orange haze no matter how "hip"
our |ob may appear to be (the world of
Appearances being what helps con and
control us as we unendingly accept our
daily oppressions) Death in industry or
death in war — these are the choices
America the Beautiful offers. Who the
Kick needs it? Wouldn't it be interesting
it ignorant" and "unorganizable"
messengers might be among the ignition
why couldn't we? (Our social statuses
are quite similar in ways.) Still, I have to
smile everytime someone says to me
"Ya know, it'll probably be the bicycle
messengers who'll overthrow the fuck-
ing government." But what if...?
In the meantime you can catch me
plowing blacktop — and hating and loving
every second of it.
A spec ial thanks to the
San I ran< is< o bike messengers
10 answered our call for graphics for
Road Warriors." We always welcome more
contributions, so send em in!
PROCESSED WORLD #15
37
OCOTLAN
Mulatto girl on the bus to Ocotlan
slowly reading the romantic
comic-book novel about
the pale poor pretty young woman
who advances in the world of the city
through clever secretarial skills
till a rich executive falls in love with her.
Brujo in the plaza of Ocotlan
in a white cowboy shirt and black aura
selling holy crosses in white envelopes:
you soak the cross in water overnight
sprinkle the corners of your house,
if anyone wishes you evil
it returns double unto him.
Dancer with his hands tied behind him
led to a tree and carved in stone
pierced with obsidian for pleasure
song-scroll issuing from his mouth like smoke,
like the call-letters of the revolution.
Young soldier with a machine-gun
guarding the crossroads,
rags of plastic whip in the wind
from every thorn, a thin trail
worn by bare feet leads from the highway
to the shacks of the very poor.
John Oliver Simon
MELANCHOLY BABY FUNNIES
My name is Eddy Paris
Eddy Paris in Newstown
Because i walk around the dark canyons of streets
Surrounded by towers of television sets
Eddy Parris in Televisiontown
In all the skyscrapers all the windows are television sets
And all i've got is a coat, five bucks
And a cigarette
But somehow sometime it's always my show
I give the news, i do the weather
I report the basketball scores from Mundelein
I do an editorial on the Shah of Edgewater
The city seems no more than a billion windows to me
A billion projections of the broken down
Facets of my prim ambitions
Your Eddy Big Paris Brother with an eye up/on your sleeve
And when it's not me it's just somebody else
It really doesn't matter
Look! even now there's a documentary of some fetish-suckling
pre-industrial, mud-a-mistic
tribe in cold borneo
on TV
But the streets are just as 'laissez faire' there
As here, and just as thick and tense
Or deep and dense
Why dont you just choose your window then live in it?
Sincerely yours,
Edward Paris
IN NAKED CITY
1) Death isn't funny
2) Orgasms are boring
3) Someone's been reading my mail
the heart races
the skin flushes
the skin squirms inside itself
like a billion nematodes
The smug face contains respectively
bloom
& death
I lit a cigarette
& thought about the tube steak getting lathered
in alleyways
in backrooms of naked city
In naked city
something spreads from the groin like an oil slick.
I pretend to read a magazine
i'm really driven
to a frenzy by my wilted bedsheets
& the rhapsodic woman-image
raven-haired
she rides
on my hips with half
closed eyes.
Shall i masturbate?
with a cut of wet meat tonight?
or should i use cold cream?
should i squirt it on the wall?
or catch it in my hand?
Shall i smear it all over my skin?
It's fun,
it's like riding a mule.
Will i come
in convulsions
that crumble my bones?
It's all in your technique,
Some will want to splatter their balls
like coconut shells
between pavingstones
& they'll get off only once at that
in naked city.
Carl Watson
JgflOJ^SS
ED WORLD #15
A SMILING HERPES
First
a little blister on
my lip
then
splitting open to
deposit its virtue over
my jaw &
growing bigger to
fill with blood &
scab over
(every
three months or so to
make its ugly
appearance this
way) &
it stays there glorifying
my face for
weeks
broadcasting
my affliction throughout
city & state:
"Take heed!" it wails.
"This man has herpes!
His face is a running
virulence!
Do not touch!"
THE BLESSING
I'm now able to sit up in a chair,
and on good days I can comb my hair,
(that is, if someone is helping me).
There will always be these memories
of the incident, but to this very day,
I haven't a single regret.
Who would have thought that I'd land
on the back of a Madison Avenue advertising
executive bending down to pick up a quarter
he saw lying on the sidewalk!
Anyone would tell you that the odds of
surviving a fall from the top of the Empire
State Building is virtually impossible. But
here I am, and things couldn't be better!
I'm now in the employ of the advertising
agency where the executive used to work.
His widow and children are all doing fine,
living quite well off the checks from the
insurance.
I'm doing fine, working exclusively with
my tongue, taking on stamps and envelopes
at such a rate that my accomplishments are
getting to be known worldwide.
There is already talk about turning my
life into a movie for TV.
And unlike before, women now smile and
say hello to me by name... something I've
been dreaming of all my life!
Jeffrey Zable
PAY DAY
There's only three things in life
that you need to keep in store:
What you do, what you're paid
and what you're paid for
I went up to heaven
had to talk to the man
I walked up to the gate
and I held out my hand
I said " I' m here to collect
my due and my debt"
He said "I'm sorry kid,
but that's all that you get"
I said "But sir, I got
three kids and a wife"
(I could not believe
I had been fired from life)
"So could you answer one question,
what was wrong with my work?"
He said "There weren't nothing wrong
'cept for one little quirk
Here, allow me to adjust your brain a little
There, now doesn't that feel better?"
I said "Thanks alot"
and I turned towards the door
It's strange, I can't remember
what I came here for
Valerie Warden
925 CRPWL
by Kathleen Hulser
fhe clock hands are stuck in molasse«. The day
crawls forward on its knees, me, too, o.i my knees
with face pushed into the carpet. Red eyes, ripped
cuticles, parched lips, a succubus in the corporate bosom.
Here with the Brokers of Record, insurances and rein-
surances, secondary sales of risk, writs underwritten in
London and Munich, Los Angeles and Brussels. Risk
management squares off in the ring with a middle-weight
claims contender. Dams and dikes put their shoulder to
disasters. Future picture: an acid rain of litigation: a
million cyclones, Bhopals, court days and damages.
The workforce. Men in the sandbox, dirtying their suits
so cleaners in Westchester and Jersey can send their
offspring to college. Paper pushers without portfolio, they
shoulder their brooms and march off to lengthy high-proof
lunches. Grey cake in the brain, like grey water stuck in
the drain loop. Vacation days, floating days, sick days,
personal days, holidays are the Liquid Plumber of the cor-
poration.
"Oh say did you see in the New York Times, the shot of
the panting dog, the lovely murderer's accomplice freed,
the four figure toilet seat on board The Enterprise?" The
day's exchanges trickle, a babbling brook of little import
and many pebbles, words and pleasantries trip
delightfully down the stream. The wind whistles in the
towers, echoes in the file cabinets. Designed to soothe
employees with white noise? Or to drive them in silent
screams to sealed windows, there to claw at vertical
blinds, rattle the slats?
I continue my crawl past miles of business bunions.
Toes wrapped and strangled in navy blue supp-hose. Toes
painted and proferred in Italian sandals. Toes curled by
their room without a view. Toes dreaming of the scrape of
tree bark, the slimy handshake of seaweed. Toes soon to
be flayed alive in a high-heeled trudge to the copyroom.
Two-faced reproduction. Girls play the xerox control
panel, stacking high copy scores. "Beware of industrial
sabotage" warns the Employee Heed This sign. A closed
circuit camera over the boss machine fails to spot the mole
hiding in the excess paper tray. The mole will make off
with priceless client lists, "eyes only" memoranda,
corporate love letters, A to Z tax evasion plans. I cross
paths with the happily laden mole off to tell the
competitors, the Russians, Uncle Sam. Off to cash in on
the free market. Off to confirm the importance of being
earnest in business.
I crawl past a flotilla of seats, their hulls stamped in
code, stenciled in black and red: "Property of K
Corporation, Inc." The secret crawlers are cryptographers
reading between the lines. "Rumplestiltskin is my name.
This way to paradise. Two somersaults to a fine season.
Seven years of fat and forget the lean." Hieroglyphics are
refreshers on a long crawl. Good humor magnetizes me,
I'm trailing a wedding-can train of paper clips. I push
through the center of a seven-mile reel of staple wire to
demag myself, creating a current that frizzles databases
on 40 floors.
Another world. Soap watchers congregate in the mail-
room behind the ten-foot corrugated rolls of Softee-send.
Front desk personnel listen to video radio on tv wrist-
40
PROCESSED WORLD #15
watches. Faces and features are remote
squiggles but domestic trauma squeaks
loud and clear. Hooked on weepies, the
soapers join a nationwide synchronous
moan of communal catharsis.
Fueling. Pinched waists, narrow
sleeves on women's suits, high heels,
slim calves. Secretaries don't eat. "Oh,
no, thanks, I'm on a diet. My skirts are
tight, just tea and yogurt for me." But
all day as I crawl, a rain of crispy crunchy
junky crumbs hails down on my head.
Squirreled in file cabinets, desk drawers,
tote bags are innumerable cello-wrapped
treats: salted, glazed, BTUed and
BTAed for freshness, filling empty
*>ecreurial tummies during empty secre-
tarial day shifts. The building vibrates
with a low-level noshing hum, like a
division of termites munching towards
Armageddon. Secretaries with pearly
teeth crunching at 9 am, 11 am, noon
time, 2, 4 and 6, whisking telltale
crumbs to the floor, deftly stashing
Oreos beneath steno-pads, tortilla chips
behind the typing stand.
The man by Folon dribbles Beaujolais
on his tie. Ruddy wrinkles roll from fore-
head to neck, disappearing into the
white moat that pens in his jowls. His
businessman's neck slopes from collar to
barrel chest and his arms are webbed to
the elbow. If pushed down a sandpit, he
would roll like a Michelin on holiday; if
started down the Alps he would launch
an avalanche to make the cuckoo-clock-
ers tell tales for generations. Stuffed on
cocktail meatballs, chunks of Swiss,
bite-sized quiche, and beef fondue at 5,
he jovially proceeds to fettucini alfredo,
lournedos and baba au rhum at 9.
Maintenance. Courtesy coffee shoots
caffeine through sluggish veins every
morning. I crawl by coffee filter set-ups
on waxed counters, past shaker jars of
petroleum distillate that passes for
morning moo. Loyalty to mid-east client
oilocracy proved in small, thoughtful
details. I go right on by to the lunch
table, past the throbbing toe of the
coffee lady. No health shoe has room for
the unruly swellings of service feet.
She's off her feet, as every morning,
studying her "Powerful Words" book-
let. She's absorbed. I wait to hear a
powerful word deployed. Will a grip on
"bilateral transaction equilibrium" pro-
pel her to the top? Will executive pumps
ease her corns?
Executive hands wash executive fin-
gers with executive rings in the
executive washroom. The sirocco strikes
the Fast Coast, a droplet-conscious
municipality hooks up the Hudson to the
faucets. Executive crud washes execu-
tive hands. Croakers flap in the soap
dishes. An eel hugs the urinal head.
I crawl under lawns of solemn oak,
scraping my eyebrows on executive desk
handles. I surface for fresh air, a peep
out the window. Businessmen scowl as
they cross the street to avoid hotel
strikers. Pot and pan reggae bounces off
the naves of Radio City. Maids and
busboys, cooks' helpers and dustforces
stick pins in the old contracts and invoke
juju mischief on hotel management. As
mounties ride the picketline, the horses
ring the Hilton, the Ritz, the Barbizon
with guest-repellent. Businessmen
scrape their shoes, and walk on to sit
with their knishes by scorched ornamen-
tal pools, lawfully drained.
TZ^iK^^XK XK .XX XK
The pool rimsters lick the final sludge
from lip edges and fingertips. The
daytide turns towards afternoon. To
soothe my hands and knees after hours
of carpet burn, I toboggan down a blind.
I plot my passage home: aiming high for
style and comfort. A grey bump under
desk edge is my ally; an abandoned, not
just temporarily parked, ball of Double-
mint provides a practical liaison. Briefly
wedded to the hardening grey twinner, I
snuggle on the sole of an elegant pump
and limo uptown.
DMC
ZHJC
:x k:
FROM THE BIRTH OF VILLAGES...
1
...TO THE BIRTH OF GREEN SPACES.
x k mr*\
PROCESSED WORLD #15
41
Remembrance
f^v of
Temp Past
The Temp by Brigitte Lozerech, translated from the
French by Kathrine Talbot, E.P. Dutton, 1984 (orig.
L'interimaire, pub 1982) Reviewed by D.S. Black.
herever I go to work as a temp, I take a good look
around to see whether the staff can use the
telephone. I watch closely, ask offhand questions,
make a first attempt to see how people react, then get hold
of a telephone, not necessarily of my own, but one where I
can make outside calls in private. They are like the calls
from a submarine cut off from the world, as I am cut off for
eight hours a day among people I have nothing in common
with, at the beck and call of a superior.
The "Minerva" temporary agency described in The
Temp, though French, is basically identical to any here.
Office bosses play the same games with their employees:
paternalistic abuse; the constant threat of arbitrary termi-
nation; continual reminders that as a temp one is in a work
force without rights, treated as though part of a super-
fluous population.
What I fear most is to be one of a crowd, an ideology, a
fashion, a herd pouring out of the same subway station,
entering identical doors in a row of houses in one street,
climbing stairs and walking through a door, saying good
morning to colleagues and sitting down at a desk for eight
hours. This seems to me so profoundly sad that I refuse to
be part of it. When I do find myself in this situation it's
only by chance, and I can say, "I'm only a stand-in. I'm a
temp. "
Despite the title, The Temp does not primarily concern
itself with the modern office and the already well-docu-
mented lot of those stuck with the mechanical tasks of
dictation, filing, reception, etc. This book is instead a
dilation and curettage profile of a person who has settled
into an obscure half-life of internal exile. Being a temp is
for her the perfect cover, a faultless way to remain
publicly silent in the din of the demanding world. She is so
deep in the abyss, so utterly dehumanized, that she can
calmly narrate the terror of her ways without a trace of
self-pity.
Pointed in its anatomization of the loner, it brings to
mind another very successful first novel: Sartre's Nausea,
published 50 years ago.
I've never been able to understand what's required of
me, and even today I haven't become part of office life.
Nothing about it seems important, there's no way in which
I'm indispensible. Nothing gives me the feeling that
makes me go home proud and erect.
The Temp, however, is not without hope, for all its
occupational gloom. The story is loosely based on the life
of its author, Ms. Brigitte Lozerech. The eponymous temp
(also named "Brigitte") is so self-concealed as to seem
traumatized, which in fact she is, still shellshocked by
childhood.
The jobs she has are of remote interest to her; as with
many office drudges, her real priorities lie elsewhere. The
extent of her dissociation is unusual, even alarming, to the
point where her feverish confessions are as rarefied as air
from an iron lung, or "the calls from the submarine"
referred to earlier. This book traces her recovering a past
as painful as any rite of passage; it is the intimate record
42
PROCESSED WORLD #15
of a person whose secrets have isolated
her, but at the same time are all that can
save her.
The thought was like a black veil
falling between me and the future. I was
unable to envisage the period separating
childhood from old age, and found it
impossible to fill the gap.
Is that why I am a temp? The present
has caught me unprepared, I never
planned for it, I've got nothing to fill it
with. It frightens me.
As well it should. If growing up wasn't
agony enough, the present is rife with
threats, complications — closing in on all
sides like a tomb.
Crowing up: large family with indif-
ferent parents, a father she craved
greater intimacy with who was preoccu-
pied with the large things in life he read
in Le Monde; eight siblings, most of
them male, most of whom took advan-
tage of her sexually; a sense of smallness
that grew over the years so that finally
the only real world seemed that of the
written word
/ would have iked u>have shown her
something of my own private life, but I
didn t have one, and since I didn't want
anyone to know this, I filled the gap with
words and beguiling phrases.
Unlike Sartre's Roquentin, she is able
to draw strength and grow as she writes,
^though as with everything it's tinged
; with a mordant self-doubt ("I do nothing
; but cut myself off and make marks on
paper").
She makes the acquaintance of a sym-
pathetic publisher — the Great Man —
\ who critiques her work in a way that does
; for her what she's missed in ten years of
•psychoanalysis.
That she's lived too much outside
herself is evident right from the start.
The Great Man calls her on this, per-
ceiving real talent through her many
layers of numbness and dissociation. He
challenges her to settle old accounts,
come to terms with herself, and thus
write better.
To work it out, she has to let long
suppressed memories surface, and face
her scar tissue of memory, hazed by the
years of sexual abuse. She does this
through writing, while continuing to
temp. Through literary exorcism, she
inds a handle on the thing she's kept
from everyone (including the therapists
the revolting memory of her lubricous
youth. In doing so, she makes her "final
confession], giving birth at last to [the]
secret "
These flashes from the past illuminate
her development as a progression in the
logic of alienation. As an extreme
example (or product) of trends in our
I
time, the main character and the writer
in this book— Brigitte, clearly distin-
guished, at one point, from her model/
creator Brigitte Lozerech — finds herself
perversely perfect for a niche on the
margins of modern life — a misfit, in
other words.
The reader must accept the verdict of
the Great Man (to which Brigitte
concurs) that her early works were
incomplete, scrapbook affairs which
served only to empower her to her next
and first successful novel, the book in
hand, The Temp.
Ironically, as her writing improves,
she becomes more of an asset to her
employer, who subsequently offers her a
permanent position. When she demurs,
she is terminated, perhaps for ingrati-
Lude
The Great Man challenges her to leave
the past well enough alone and focus on
herseli and the present, to attend to the
spindled, sometimes mutilated film
through which she sees herself:
/ c/ s hr.ir you tell i/s what you do. "
Me? I said. "I don't do anything.
I m a temp
He looked at me with interest. "A
temp,'' he said. That's not nothing.
Now we're getting somewhere. "
As she writes the book, she's assailed
by images from a fragmented past.
PROCESSED WORLD #15
43
It seemed that I still had to learn
everything about myself and my Hie. I
had to go back in time, but all around me
there was nothing but fog. The outlines
of my brothers and my cousins became
vague. I could no longer tell them apart
and saw them only from the waist down.
It seemed to me as if I saw a film unroll
itself before me in the fog, a blurred film
so damaged in parts that yards and yards
of it were quite useless, and long
stretches of it were missing.
To work on her new novel she cuts
herself off from all traditional ties. She
moves and does not give her family her
new address. Her lifestyle as a temp is
perfectly suited to severing these few
connections, and with a small advance
from the Great Man, she can be selective
about her assignments.
While she applies herself to "the
jumbled alphabet of the keyboard" on
her own terms, she recognizes both the
occupational and in part deliberate
tenuousness of all her relationships; in
every way she is a temp.
Though her perspective is fearful and
confined, she writes about il in
language beautiful and precise; her
typewriter must be fitted with a
jeweller's eye off the dissecting table.
Clinically, she records the fallout levels of
a nuclear family, and details the familiar
(though far from trite) denial of herself
as an individual, thinking reed, in the
office of today. Temping her way
through these modern chambers of
horror makes her conscious and alive—
among other things, this woman is a
survivor.
American readers might not see any
political relevance to a story of this sub-
jectivity. One may sympathize with
Brigitte (and even find her inspiring),
but to take her as a paradigm for
emulation will probably occur to few. It
is certainly extreme for an office worker
to be so alienated as to have no friends at
all. And if someone's had a rough child-
hood, so what? Haven't we all? Creative
expression is not a form of catharsis
available to or even desired by all. Since
Joseph Heller's bleak 1974 novel, Some-
thing Happened, the drift in mainstream
American culture has been towards a
wry, accepting view of "capitalist
realism" (the classic success story in
which boy meets bank). The film 9 to 5
paid lip service to some popular images
of enlightened reform, but was at core an
affirmation of what it pretended to
critique [see PW #7].
Americans can't bear too much
reality.
The Temp is a stark selfportrait of an
otherwise heavily armored, closeted
clerical worker. Her experience issues as
notes from a low-rise underground on
the outskirts of Paris. In its lapidary
perfection, exploring one person's
psyche, strengths and insecurities, and
how all this is reflected in her past and
immediate environment, it falls square
in the tradition of the European 6/7-
dungsroman — an effective write of pas-
sage.
Whether one temps or not, it is of
interest more than just as a tale of toil —
it's a tale of our times, when business is
business (and there's no business like no
business).
When people ask me why I'm still a
temp though I'm over thirty, I say it's
because I lack ambition. My only
ambition is to write this book, to find my
own truth in it and exorcise my secret.
Whether or not the book sells, I'll remain
a temp.
Is she still a temp? Ms. Lozerech's
book was an "immediate sensation" and
#1 bestseller on publication in France,
three years ago. At least as a temp she
has writing she "can fall back on." The
boss that smirked condescendingly when
she told of her need to write has been put
in his place. Though parents and bosses
everywhere are loath to encourage this,
or any creative outlet, in Brigitte
Lozerech, we are fortunate to find
someone whose ambition and talent have
transmuted the stuff of daily death and
past pain into true literature.
"What I fear most is to be one of the crowd, an
ideology, a fashion, a herd pouring out
of the same subway station,
entering identical
doors
in a
row of
houses in
one street,
climbing
stairs and
walking through
a door, saying
good morning to
colleagues and
sitting down
desk for eight
♦•;.. » „,»* - ■■""" , •• *Atf'>'!!:s«S mi?>».» »".■*. :**\« *\ T; •'», y«l 4
V'V'Vm, •""•'" , ;\,i 1 »V>\ •.■v'V\<* i***^*!! 11 v»' Apologies to Carlo Carra, Joan Miro, and "
&*v»>\* v, V* v '»°rt r *»' , »^"i v^'V.p, """.i v^V-i,'-*"'- Paul Delvaux, whose paintings were collaged for this article - x |
44
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Today's woman isn't satisfied with sneaking
a smoke on the kitchen porch. She needs a
cigarette whose image matches the obsessions
we've engineered for her— from the all-too-
obvious symbolism of the "extra long" shape to
the anorexic models we use in our ads.
• A cigarette like her day at work— lengthy
yet fast-burning, bland but with a harsh
aftertaste.
• A cigarette that seems to ease her
through the frenzied, smiling boredom
of the modern office even while it eats
away her lungs.
• A cigarette that helps her swallow any
angry refusals or shrieks of despair.
She needs Virginia Stings 150's.
Suck on that, baby.
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now
May Reduce Your Usefulness To Business.
Illustration by Louis Michaelson
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